


Precession

by Saathi1013



Series: Ephemerides [4]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Depression, Identity Issues, Other, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, POV Third Person Limited, Polyamory, Polyfidelity, lots of additional characters in the background, lots of canonical pairings in the background, various permutations of Dee/Lee/Kara/Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 15:17:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7366963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saathi1013/pseuds/Saathi1013
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Kara Thrace returns from the dead, promising a way to Earth, sending her spouses into (another) tailspin.  Dee goes on the Demetrius; Sam and Lee stay behind.</p><blockquote>
  <p>“In my experience, the more personalities involved in a relationship, the faster it falls apart,” the Six says.  “I should warn you: the more you sacrifice, the less you’ll have left, in the end.”</p>
  <p>“I’m sorry you’ve been hurt,” Dee says.  “But that’s not true, not for us.”</p>
  <p>“How can you be so sure?” the Six asks, and instead of the sneering challenge it could have been, it seems like genuine curiosity.</p>
  <p>“Our wife just came back to us from the dead,” Dee points out.  “After that, some things don’t feel quite so impossible.”</p>
</blockquote><p>This fic picks up where <i>Occultation</i> left off, and parallels the series from <i>He That Believeth in Me</i> (4x01) up till partway through <i>Sometimes A Great Notion</i> (4x11).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Resurrection Reactions

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Julandran for the excellent beta, and to Cbucsrule7 for the lovely, steadfast encouragement.
> 
> I feel the need to share here that, ever since I started this fic, it's had a note at the top that said:  
>  _Previously: Starbuck’s back, and she knows the way to Earth, hey na, hey na._
> 
> ...because I am a thoroughly ridiculous human being.

 

“Don’t lose me this time, Apollo,” Kara says, amusement dancing in her voice over the speakers.

On Dradis, the Cylons swarm like wasps, like locusts, like carrion beetles around the recently-paralyzed vessels of the Fleet. They lose the Pyxis; the Zephyr drops off comms for a long minute after its ring gets fractured open by Raider fire, and then it finally returns Dee’s hails with desperate shouting amidst a cascade of static.

Dee does her duty, efficient and steady despite the weight of glances frequently thrown her way. She _does her duty,_ because this is war and there are lives on the line. If there is one more life than she expected to have (back) in their (her) hands, then that makes her dedication all the more essential.

Kara’s earlier words echo in the back of her mind, though. _It’s going to be okay._

Dee couldn’t say why, but she believes it. Impossible certainty delivered in a dead woman’s voice, surely a trick, surely a trap, but Dee believes it anyway. _It really is me._

Sam is muttering to himself, words too low to distinguish, but it’s polluting the line. “Longshot, what’s your status?” she asks.

“My guns are jammed,” he says. “My guns—” He’s in the middle of the whirlwind; any number of hostiles could lock on to him, take him apart.

Dee holds herself very, very still. Stays very, very quiet. She keeps her head down, doesn’t look at anyone else in the CIC. Calmly, _calmly,_ she waits for his voice to come back. Her fingers tremble, once, and she grips the edge of her console so they’ll stop. _It won’t happen again,_ she tells herself, determined to believe it. _We won’t lose Sam, we can’t, not now, not with Kara— _

“What the _hell?”_ Tigh says, and she looks over at the central monitors.

“They just stopped. They’re just... leaving,” Apollo reports. Sure enough, the swarm withdraws like an outgoing tide, leaving broad swaths of wrack and ruin behind. 

“Squadrons, report,” Helo says, and among all the others, Sam’s voice comes on cue. Dee takes a steady breath, then another and another:

“Apollo here,” Lee says. “I’ll escort our bogey home.”

“ _Bogey,_ ” Kara laughs like he’s joking, triumphant and carefree like this is just another firefight she’s survived unscathed. “Starbuck here, and I know the way home, thanks. Someone remind me why I married this dork?”

Dee doesn’t hear what response, if any, this receives, because now the Admiral’s standing in front of her station, scrutinizing her intently. She squares her shoulders and lifts her chin to meet his gaze, unwavering.

“What do you say, Dee?” he asks.

“She sounds right,” Dee says, packing as much meaning as she can into those three words. Her father-in-law nods.

“Petty Officer Asher,” the Admiral says, turning away. “Please take over for Lieutenant Dualla. Lieutenant, Commander Tigh, you’re with me.” Dee scrambles to her feet to comply, barely remembering to remove her headset to hand it off to Asher before she catches herself on the cord.

 

* * *

 

There’s a small crowd gathered on the hangar deck below by the time Dee, Tigh, & the Admiral arrive on the catwalk. The Colonel gestures wordlessly, and the complement of marines he’d collected on the way split off to descend the ladders on either side, synchronized approaches to flank the prodigal pilot.

Lee and Sam already bookend Kara, speaking to her with wondering, incredulous expressions, hands on her arms, her shoulder, her back, as if contact will keep her anchored, keep her _real._ Kara’s turned away; Dee can’t see her wife’s face. The deck crew and most of the other pilots form a wary ring around them.

Chief Tyrol paces a slow orbit along the perimeter of the wide space around the trio. He’s perhaps the only one who knows what they’re feeling right now. The only question that remains is whether this is _their_ Kara or someone else sent in her place, carrying her memories in tandem with an unknown agenda. There’s a moment where Dee imagines Kara pregnant, like Athena, and she has to swallow a hysterical laugh, appalled at the idea. One half-cylon’s trouble enough.

“You have two minutes, Lieutenant,” the Admiral says, low and firm. An order, not a favor granted. Dee suspects she’ll be asked to give a full report later. She doesn’t care.

The pilots say there’s a trick to getting down the ladder at speed, but Dee’s never really gotten the knack. She’s never needed it before.

Today, she _flies,_ her boots hitting the deck in the blink of an eye. No one sees her coming, too focused on the tableaux in front of the gleaming white Viper. She has to shove her way through. There are a few startled exclamations until people see who it is, and then they let her pass.

For all the urgency hammering through her veins, Dee stops dead in her tracks just outside of arm’s reach. Kara’s face is twisted in disbelief when she spots her. Their husbands must have filled her in. “Two _months—_?” she asks, and Dee nods. “My clock says— it only feels like—”

Dee takes the last two steps between them all in a rush, and kisses her with all the sudden violence of a sucker punch, her hands framing Kara’s face in a bruising clutch, teeth cutting into lips until they both taste copper. Starbuck makes a small sound, and Dee pulls back to see a red streak vivid across her mouth. “I’m _sorry,_ ” Kara says, “I didn’t—” and Dee wants to hit her again.

“Starbuck,” the Admiral’s voice interrupts, clear and ringing. Their two minutes are up.

 

* * *

 

Sam’s arm is a warm, solid line against Dee’s shoulder as they sit side-by-side on one of the omnipresent storage crates along the corridor walls. Not far away, Lee paces back and forth across the hall in a precise, angry circuit. They’re not allowed into the infirmary; marines guard the hatch.

“What do you think?” Sam asks quietly.

“Let’s just wait to see what the results are,” Lee answers, his voice as clipped as his steps.

“Was I asking you?” Sam says, tensing up. Lee’s footsteps falter, come closer.

“Hey,” Dee snaps, looking up from the deck to pin them each with a glare. _“Not_ the time.” She wonders if they’ve spoken at all in the last two months outside morning pilots’ briefings, back when Lee was still CAG. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Baltar’s magic cylon detector never worked in the first place, so I don’t know what they think they’re even trying to prove.”

“What if they could find out,” Sam murmurs. “What if she was… what if she _is_ a cylon, if she has been all this time…”

“She’s _not_ a cylon, Sam,” Lee says, and he sounds so sure about it but also so, so _tired._ As if he’s already had this debate with himself a thousand times on the trip between the hangar deck and this hatch. Knowing Lee, he probably has.

“But what if she _is,_ okay?” Sam says, a strange, high note in his voice. “What do we— what’s going to happen to her? What would you do, what would either of you—?”

“I don’t _know,_ Sam,” Lee says, halfway to a shout. “I don’t know what you expect me to _say_ here. I don’t think there’s an easy answer. It depends on a dozen other questions that I hope I never have to ask, because I hope we _never_ get the answer that means we have to ask them, all right?” He props his forearm high on the wall, leaning his forehead against his wrist, shoulders slumping. “All I know is, that’s our wife in there.” Not ‘my’ wife, but _‘our.’_ For a moment, Dee wants to reach out to him, offer some of the support that she and Sam share. He’s too far away, though, too closed off and wrapped up in his own pain for her to reach him. “An hour ago, I thought she was dead. So right now, I’m just glad she’s in there to ask questions about in the first place.” He straightens up, his face smoothing out like he’s about to go on duty. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be waiting in the Admiral’s quarters.” He leaves, and it feels like he takes half the oxygen with him, because Dee’s lungs heave for a minute after he’s gone.

Sam tucks her under one arm, lets her catch her breath. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You okay?” Dee thinks for a minute before nodding, even though it’s not really true: she can’t remember the last time it _was_ true. But she doesn’t know how else to respond.

“You got a shortcut, y’know,” she says to Sam after a little while. “In the Academy, we take all these classes, not just the ones you’d expect on battle tactics and military history, but also stuff like engineering, physics, aeronautics… every time that jump technology came up, there was always the same question: where does a ship go between departure and arrival? And we always got the same answer. It involved some thought experiment about a cat in a box where you don’t know whether it’s alive or dead, do you know that one?” She looks up at him.

“Vaguely,” he admits. “I didn’t… I didn’t really major in theoretical physics.”

Dee gives him a faint smile. “The point is, the cat _could be_ either, but there’s no way of knowing until you open the box. The act of observation determines which state it’s in, but until you look, it’s kind of both at once.”

“So... Kara’s both a cylon and _not_ a cylon,” he says, brow furrowed.

“I’m saying, even if it seems impossible, at least we know that the cat’s alive.” Dee says. “What we _really_ oughta be asking now is: how many lives does she have left?” Sam huffs a small, puzzled laugh against her hair. “Hey, there’s a reason I’m not a jump drive engineer, okay?”

His arm tightens around her, and they wait.

 

* * *

 

The sound of the hatch opening jolts Dee from a slight doze. She feels like she hasn’t properly slept in _ages,_ her eyes stinging as she blinks rapidly to focus them. Tory comes out first, giving them a slight, nervous glance, Laura – _the President_ – right behind her. Dee snaps to attention, Sam on his feet a moment later.

President Roslin pauses when she spots Sam and Dee, looking surprised, then thoughtful. On New Caprica, she’d trusted Dee’s counsel about the Resistance, trusted her with her life. It feels like a lifetime ago; Dee’s not sure what’s left of the ‘Laura’ she knew then. “All right,” Roslin declares reluctantly, “Come along, if you must.” Half a step behind her, the Admiral shoots them a forbidding glance, and Dee infers that their presence will be suffered only if they comport themselves appropriately.

“Yes, ma’am,” Dee says, just as Sam’s saying, _“Thank_ you, ma’am,” with emphatic gratitude.

 

* * *

 

As it turns out, Cottle’s tests were just comparisons to the samples he had on file, and the results are a match, whatever that means _._ Whether Kara’s a cylon, though, is still unknown.

She still insists she’s been to Earth. She has photos from her Viper’s gun cameras: a whole array of prints, crisp and clear. Dee trails her fingertips across one, tracing the bright round shape of a yellow moon hanging above a vivid blue-and-green world.

Roslin asks questions, and Kara replies with the same story, again and again and again. Star patterns matching those they’d seen in Athena’s tomb. A giant gas planet with rings. A flashing triple star. A comet.

And no memory, no clear knowledge of how she got from _there_ to _here_.

Roslin’s steely disbelief fills the room like a creeping, prickling vapor, even the Admiral silent as the women stare each other down. Lee is restless in his seat while Kara’s voice climbs, sure and certain and desperate for someone, _anyone_ to believe her. Roslin asks and asks and asks again, prodding, probing, watching for a weakness.

Dee chews on the inside of her cheek, shoots a quelling glance at Sam when she sees him shift forward, his fingers curling into fists. Starbuck’s not one to need – or approve of – someone charging in to be her white knight, and this fight’s one that they’re all ill-prepared for, besides. Still, Dee can appreciate the impulse.

“Let’s go see this Viper,” the Admiral says, during a momentary lull. “Starbuck, I want you to go talk to Gaeta, see if you can match up any of these photos with our long-range scans.” Kara relaxes in fractional increments, first when he says her callsign and again when she realizes he’s giving her a _chance_.

On their way out, Dee catches up to the Admiral. “Sir, may I—” she starts.

“Lieutenant, I think you’ve been away from your station for long enough, don’t you?” he comments, giving her a shrewd look over the edge of his glasses.

Dee suppresses a smile. “Yes sir,” she says, saluting.

 

* * *

 

The astrometrics station is clear across the command deck, but Dee can see Gaeta and Kara’s postures grow more antagonistic over the next hour, squaring off on opposite sides of the light table. Helo must notice Dee’s preoccupation, because he gives her a sympathetic smile before he heads over to defuse the impending argument. He’s only partially successful; Kara turns on him instead, insistent and adamant.

Dee turns back to jump prep, reassuring anxious captains that yes, they’re still safe; no, they aren’t jumping because they think the cylons are about to arrive again; the Fleet’s just following the course to Earth. She doesn’t tell them that she’s seen it, seen photos, seen proof that it exists, that it’s within their reach… She doesn’t tell them that it’s beautiful, that it’s real. Really, truly _real._

 _It’s going to be okay,_ Kara had said, voice calm and true. _I’ve been to Earth. I know where it is. And I’m gonna take us there._

Dee tells the Fleet that everything’s fine, and she tries to believe it.

“It doesn’t _work_ like that,” Starbuck snaps behind Dee, her voice raising enough to be audible.

Dee takes three deep breaths, and counts down to the next jump over the comms.

_3… 2… 1… Jump!_

There’s a sharp cry, and Dee looks around to see Starbuck holding the heel of her hand to her temple. Beside her, the Admiral looks wary and weary while Kara visibly pleads for his faith.

Someone clears their throat behind Dee, and she startles, mortifyingly. “Sorry,” Hoshi says. “It’s just. Your shift ended five minutes ago…?” The clock confirms it. She exhales heavily, giving him an apologetic look, and they start the shift-change checklist.

When she looks up again, Kara and her marine guards are gone.

 

* * *

 

This is what Dee does, almost every day she’s been on duty on the Galactica: she monitors Fleet communication; she logs incoming and outgoing calls. She helps Gaeta track ships and shipments, transports and passenger transfers. She handles over half the paperwork that the Admiral signs every day, and she makes sure it all gets delivered to the right departments at the right time.

However, she has – on rare occasion – been... _persuaded_ to do her job with less than her usual equitable efficiency, or mistakenly dropped minor tidbits of information in conversation with her fellow crewmates. This is to be expected; in a constant state of war, of fear and anxiety and no immediate relief in sight, slip-ups are inevitable. It’s never noticeably impacted the functioning of the ship, or of the Fleet, but it’s usually improved morale.

(This is, perhaps, why Lee came to her when he wanted to sneak off the ship with Roslin, after Tigh declared martial law. And almost certainly why Tory and Tigh came to her to help rig the election, for all the good _that_ did anyone.)

What all of this boils down to is: many, _many_ people aboard Galactica – and a fair number elsewhere in the Fleet – owe Dee a favor or two.

 _Time to start collecting,_ she thinks.

 

* * *

 

The Six stares at the bundle in Dee’s outstretched hands like it’s a basket of snakes.

“They’re for you,” Dee says. “I’m not sure about size, but. This place always seemed… cold.” She sets the clothing down on one end of the bed, and the Six sinks gracefully to sit beside it.

“...why?” the Six asks. She unfolds the well-worn shirt, pants, and zip-up sweatshirt, catching a pair of balled-up socks before it rolls off the bed.

There's no need for pretense, to act like this gesture is anything but an attempt to encourage reciprocity. “I think someone I know might be a cylon,” Dee says, choosing her words carefully, and feels Sam stiffen beside her. “And since you’re the only other one on board…”

The Six smiles up at them, and it’s like being bathed in a heat lamp. Dee’s skin prickles. “You’re referring to Kara Thrace, yes?” she asks. Dee lifts her eyebrows, surprise and silent query both. “You’re not the only one to ask about her today.”

“Who else?” Sam interjects.

“The President, of course,” the Six answers, but she’s still staring at Dee. “...I _remember_ you. Dee, isn’t it?”

Dee’s tongue goes thick in her mouth, some instinct in the back of her mind shrilly screaming _danger!_ She nods, almost regretting having asked the guards for some privacy.

 _“Anastasia Dualla,”_ the Six says carefully, as if remembering, or prompting. “It’s good to see you well.”

Dee freezes, and then her stomach does a slow, roiling churn. She takes a step back, bumping into Sam, and his hands come up to catch her shoulders. Steady anchor now, when she had none then. It’s enough for her to come back to herself, to regain some composure. “You—” Dee tries, tasting ash, tasting bile, tasting _shame._ She swallows hard. “You were there, on New Caprica. On Colonial One.” _With Baltar,_ she doesn’t say, not wanting to speak his name.

The Six nods, and there’s something like sympathy in her eyes. “You said then that Kara was all you had left.” Her eyes flick to rest on Sam, then slide away again just as quickly. “Clearly that’s not true anymore. So: what _is_ she to you? Now?”

Dee presses her mouth into a firm line. This woman isn’t the one with the power here, not now; Dee’s not obligated to answer anything to get the information she wants in exchange. She didn’t have to beg just to get in the door.

“She’s our _wife,”_ Sam spits out, looming behind Dee like a furious sentinel.

The Six looks at him, really _looks_ for the first time since they walked into her cell, and her eyes go wide. “I remember you, too,” she says. Dee can feel the sharp intake of Sam’s breath as much as hear it, in the rapid press of his ribs against her spine. “We met on Caprica, in the parking garage. I’m glad you survived.”

“You… you’re the one who killed that Three for me, let me escape,” Sam says, and exhales heavily in faint amusement. “Small frakking universe.”

The Six’s regard slips away from Sam again. “So you married her. _Both_ of you…?” There’s something bitter to how her mouth curls. “I’m sorry.”

“So she _is...”_ Dee says, trailing off when she realizes that there’s no surprise in her voice, in her mind. _Kara’s a cylon,_ she thinks for the first time, believing it; it sounds too like the truth to shock her.

“Oh!” the Six says, shaking her head. “Oh, _no,_ I don’t know if she’s one of the Five. I… don’t know who they are. We're inhibited from even _thinking_ about them.”

“So you wouldn’t be able to tell us even if you were looking one in the eye,” Dee says, feeling defeated. Sam’s hands grip her shoulders in a quick, convulsive clutch.

The Six shakes her head again. “Afraid not.” She lifts the sweatshirt from the pile, stroking the washed-soft fabric.

“Then why are you sorry?” Dee can’t help but ask.

“In my experience, the more personalities involved in a relationship, the faster it falls apart,” the Six says, pulling the sweatshirt on, wrapping it tight around herself. “I should warn you: the more you sacrifice, the less you’ll have left, in the end.”

“I’m sorry you’ve been hurt,” Dee says. “But that’s not true, not for us.” She very, _very_ carefully doesn’t think about Lee.

“How can you be so sure?” the Six asks, and instead of the sneering challenge it could have been, it seems like genuine curiosity.

“Our wife just came back to us from the dead,” Dee points out. “After that, some things don’t feel quite so impossible.” _Adamas have the tendency to take the long odds,_ she’d told the Tighs once, the last time she’d left Pegasus.

“I’m sorry I won’t be there to see how your faith is rewarded,” the Six says. “But... thank you for the clothing.”

 

* * *

 

Cally comes into the infirmary, deep circles under her eyes as she looks around.

“If you’re looking for Cottle, he’ll be out in a few minutes,” Dee says, patting the chair next to her. It’s a little late for a scheduled visit, but then, that’s one of the reasons she picked this hour for her own business. “Everything all right? How’s Nicky doing?”

Cally drops gracelessly into the empty seat like the gravity plating’s acting up. “Nicky’s fine. I don’t know how to thank you and Gaeta for all your help with him,” she says. “I just can’t _sleep._ My mind keeps racing, and it’s stupid, but I feel like Galen’s acting weird and…” She scrubs a hand over her face. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t be complaining to you; you’ve got enough to deal with.”

“I’m kind of glad for the distraction,” Dee says. “All you probably need is a good night’s sleep. Maybe ask the Doc for some sleep meds tonight? And in the morning, you should go down to Dogsville. There’s an apothecary there with a friend who works in hydroponics – I hear she’s got a tea that’ll knock you right on your ass.”

Cally lifts one corner of her mouth, something too fragile to be a real smile, but trying anyway. “Sure thing,” she says. “So I gotta ask: what’s the deal with Starbuck? Her ship’s brand new, and I hear she’s been saying something about Earth—?”

Dee doesn’t know how to explain it, but anything’s better than just waiting here alone. So she gives Cally a quick rundown, omitting the parts that the Admiral had declared classified.

“...do you think she’s a cylon?” Cally asks, disgust evident in her tone.

Dee’s not surprised. They’d both survived New Caprica together, and Dee hasn’t any stones to throw regarding ill will towards cylons, either. But it doesn’t seem that simple, not anymore. “...I think she might be,” Dee answers finally. Cally’s lip curls. “Don’t look at me like that, what if it were Galen? Thinking he was dead for two months and then he walks onto the deck one morning—”

“Don’t even joke about that,” Cally blurts, shaking her head.

“I’m just saying,” Dee says, holding her hands up in surrender. “We’ve for sure got two cylons aboard who betrayed their people for us – for _love,_ apparently. And if that’s true, then I’m not so scared of my wife being one. I’m just glad she’s back.” She tips her head back against the seat. “Well, if it’s the same her, that is. _That’s_ what I’m worried about.”

“...do you believe in the gods?” Cally asks after a minute, quiet. Dee lifts her head to look at her, but her head’s bowed, restless fingers picking at a loose thread on her knee.

“Not exactly,” Dee says. “But I’m starting to think there’s _something…_ ”

Cally’s forehead creases. “Baltar’s God?”

This surprises a bark of laughter out of Dee, and she covers her mouth with one hand. “Oh, gods, no. No. Not even a little. But maybe…” Dee says, pondering aloud. “Maybe believing in us, in the people I love, is enough.”

Cally smiles, wavering but getting stronger, soft and vulnerable. “I dedicated Nicky to Ares and Apollo,” she says. Dee remembers; she also remembers centurions gunning Nora down in the temple afterwards, but she’s not going to mention _that._ “I feel like I have to keep believing, keep going no matter how… how _tired_ I get. Like I made a bargain with them to keep him safe. It’s just. It’s just really _hard,_ sometimes.”

Dee knows the feeling, New Caprica memories crowding close and thick in the back of her mind. If she’d had to pick patrons for a child back then, Ares and Apollo would have made a lot of sense. But they’re not gods known for being gentle with their adherents, either. “Yeah,” she says, reaching over to squeeze Cally’s hand. “Yeah, it really is.”

They both fall into silence, each lost in their own reverie.

 

* * *

 

“I’ve finished the first scan,” Cottle tells Dee. “We’ve got twenty minutes ‘till the next jump, so if you want to keep her company, I’ve got another patient waiting.”

“Sure,” Dee says, and catches his elbow before he goes. “And thank you. Really.”

His eyebrows pull together in a dubious tangle. “It’s no skin off my ass,” he says dismissively. “Especially not after all you did for all those girls who… Well, it’s the least I could do, not that I think anything’ll come of it. All the other tests showed bupkis.”

“No harm in trying, though, right?” Dee says.

“Yeah, no harm in trying,” he concedes, and leaves to find Cally.

Dee turns to the door to the MRI room, and feels her feet turn leaden in apprehension as she realizes that this will be the first time she’ll be alone with Kara since she came back. _What do you say to a resurrected spouse, anyway?_ she thinks. _Hey, how was the afterlife? Did you decide to come back because you were bored, or—?_

Dee shakes her head sharply. Cally’s not the only one who needs sleep.

Medina, one of the marine guards, opens the door for her as she approaches. “You sure about this, Dee?” she asks in a low murmur.

“No,” Dee says. “But I think we’ll be fine, thanks.”

Kara’s head snaps up as Dee comes in, and they both stare at each other, the door latching loudly in the wary silence.

“Dee—” Kara says, hopping down off the scanning bed. Dee’s hands lift, palms forward between them, and Kara stops, face twisting in anguish. “Dee, it’s _me.”_

“...lift up your shirt,” Dee says. She doesn’t want to do anything else, say anything else, until she _knows._ The MRIs aren’t for her; she has her own metrics. Kara frowns. _“Please,”_ Dee says, her voice breaking a little.

Kara’s expression turns mulish, but she drops her jacket and peels up her shirt quickly enough, crossing her arms in front of her when she’s done. “Is this some kind of back-from-the-dead hazing thing?” she asks, voice getting that cutting, sarcastic edge that means she’s feeling vulnerable and _hating_ it. “Or did you just miss my tits? ’Cause I can take the bra off, too, if you want.”

Dee suppresses a grimace. “This isn’t—” she starts, and sighs, stepping forward, lifting her hands up again, placating instead of defensive. Kara’s pants are slung low on her hips because they won’t let her have a belt, and right above the waistband, Dee can see two scars on her abdomen. One’s from a bullet that Kara used to show off all the time, and the second is the one she doesn’t like to talk about _ever._ The one from the Farm.

Small details, ones that the cylons wouldn’t necessarily replicate, right? Dee’s not entirely sure how the resurrection process works, but adding bullet scars and _removing ovaries_ seem like a bit much.

“Show me your right arm,” Dee says.

Kara gives her a wry grimace but holds it out. Dee steps closer, wrapping her hand around her wife’s wrist, twisting it upwards so that she can look at the soft inner line of it. The inked text just below her elbow is slightly blurred around the edges, as faded with time as Dee’s always seen it. She traces her hand across the letters, and Kara’s hand clutches in the empty air at the ticklish touch.

“Turn around,” Dee says, and Kara must understand what’s going on, because she does, propping her elbows on the scanning bed and leaning forward so that the skin on her back is stretched in a smooth arc under the light. The heavy, blocky pyramid catches Dee’s eye first – _got it to cover up an ex-boyfriend’s name,_ Kara’d explained once, rolling her eyes at her past self’s stupidity – but that’s not what Dee’s looking for.

“Should’ve taken off the bra, after all, huh,” Kara says dryly.

“Don’t,” Dee says, and hooks her thumbs under the band to pull it up herself. And there, between Kara’s shoulderblades, is the mark Dee’s looking for.

 

* * *

 

_It wasn’t what Dee expected. The four of them crowded close around the paper, Kara tipping it this way and that, peering at it appraisingly. It was almost abstract, symmetrical and neatly-segmented shapes rendered in stark black and white._

_“It looks Tauron,” Sam said._

_“It does,” Lee said. “My grandfather had ink like this, and some of his friends. I asked him about it, once, and he said each mark was a story, but not ones he could tell me ‘till I got older.” His mouth quirked at the memory._

_“Not just Tauron,” the Mnemoscine corrected in a voice like fallen leaves from her seat on the other side of the table. “Ha’la’tha.”_

_“That sounds familiar. I think I knew a girl once…” Sam started, then frowned._

_“Can’t remember the name of one of your adoring C-Bucs fans, Sammy?” Kara teased, and he scrunched his nose and leaned into her until she lost her balance a little, stumbling and snickering as she righted herself again._

_“What does it mean?” Dee asked finally._

_“You wanted a wedding mark, something for all four, of all four, and so,” the woman said, reaching up to take the paper from them. She set it on the table and began pointing at different segments of the design. “Here, the wide, steady earth,” indicating the large crescent at the base, “the bright, warm sun,” tapping a circle between that crescent and a smaller one that faced the opposite direction, which she traced next, “the bow of the huntress, and the guiding star.” That last was a four-pointed shape towards the top, with sweeping rays that fragmented the dark space around it, a line dropping all the way back to the base, linking each central shape together, to the whole._

_“But—” Lee said, forehead rumpled._

_The Mnemoscine rapped her knuckles against the table and stared up at him with an imperious tilt to her jaw and the cloudy gaze that was the mark of her order. Everyone knew that you didn’t argue with a Mnemoscine; you didn’t tell them what you wanted them to ink. That’s how you wound up going back for cover-ups. _

_This was how it worked; this was where faith took over, and Dee had gotten used to leaping, by then._

_It also… felt right, though Dee couldn’t explain it any better if she’d tried. “I like it,” she said decisively, and from the way Lee blinked, he hadn’t been expecting hers to be the first endorsement. “I think I’ll get it, even if no one else does.” She could show it off to Felix, laugh about her impulsiveness with Lee when they’re old and gray. Look at it in the mirror, sometimes, when she wanted a reminder, a visible tether beneath her skin._

_“To be sure, I’m jumping the gun on this one somewhat,” the old woman said, sensing their hesitation. “But I won’t be around by the time you’ve grown into it, and I want to make sure you have it when you need it.” She lifted the drawing from the table, holding it over her shoulder. “Aleta, time to work!”_

_Her acolyte slipped into the room and took the paper reverently. “If you’ll follow me,” Aleta said, her eyes still a clear, rich brown, “I will have the honor of bestowing the mark the gods have revealed.”_

_Lee looked visibly relieved at this, and Kara snorted at him. “You didn’t really think the theobule was gonna be the one to ink us, didja?”_

_And it was ‘us,’ in the end. Each design was slightly different, according to placement and some arcane reasoning of the acolyte, but all four had the same set of symbols in the center. After Dee had hers set between her shoulderblades, Kara got hers there, too, the edges a little spikier, the corners a little sharper. Then Sam had hopped onto the table, rolling up his sleeve and making exaggerated faces at the pain while Aleta added a dancing, weaving row of dots along the sides. Lee had gone last, pulling off his shirt, tapping two fingers over his heart._

_“I like the idea of carrying on a family tradition,” he explained. “Even if it skipped a generation.” And, appropriately enough, his had extra swooping shapes framing the sides, wide black tapering lines adding movement and emphasis to the design. His looks more Tauron somehow, like the symbols on their oldest buildings, in their company logos and the designs of the banners at their spaceport._

_“Guess we’re all Adamas now,” Kara declared, a faint wistful echo lurking in the back of her voice._

_“I’m still not changing my name,” Dee said._

_“...yeah, me either,” Sam added, and Kara choked on a laugh._

 

* * *

 

Dee strokes her thumb over Kara’s tattoo, seeing the freckle at seven o’clock on the sun, the familiar unevenness of the rays around the star, wondering how far cylons would go…

 _Well, they nuked twelve planets and chased the last of us halfway around the galaxy,_ she tells herself. _So: pretty far._

Still, Kara’s skin trembles under her hand, goosebumps raising at her touch. When Dee presses her mouth against the smaller crescent, Kara’s breath hitches just like it used to. She smells the same; her sweat tastes the same when Dee pulls back and licks her lips. All of it, everything still the same.

 _“Dee,_ ” Kara says, quiet and broken, and Dee leans back, letting Kara turn in her arms _exactly_ the way she knows she will. Kara kisses her, careful and deep and thorough, like she’s trying to prove something, like she’s trying to tell Dee everything without words, trying to make her believe. She breaks away, gasping for air in between words: “Dee. I’m not. A cylon. Please. I—”

Dee drags her close again with a hand on the back of her neck, fingers tangling in the fine hair already coming loose from its ponytail. Kara’s hands land on her shoulder, on her hip, pull her in tight like they’re doing this in a cramped pilots’ rack, trying not to knock elbows and knees on the walls, trying not to roll out. Dee kisses her until she feels something unwind in Kara’s posture, becoming pliant and yielding and _relieved._

Dee disentangles slowly, enough that she can catch Kara’s gaze, focus on her face without going cross-eyed. She cups Kara’s cheek with her palm. “Even if you’re a cylon,” Dee says, catching Kara’s face with her other hand as it turns away, making her meet her eyes, “you’re still Starbuck, you’re still Kara, you’re still my _wife._ Do you hear me? I still love you, and trust you, and I believe you when you say you’ll show us the way to Earth, okay? I’ll go with you, even if no one else wants to. Just don’t d– _disappear_ again.”

Kara wrenches away, snuffling wetly, mouth stretched in a quavering grimace as she blinks rapidly. “Don’t,” she croaks, “Don’t say that, Dee. How— How can you even—?”

“Because I believe that you’re _you,_ toaster or no,” Dee says. “I believe that you came back to us for a reason. ...and, y’know, _statistically_ speaking, when Starbuck wants to do something that looks stupid, it usually ends as a net win for everybody.”

This surprises a damp, staccato burst of laughter from her wife, and then more sniffling as Kara swipes at her face with her fingers, the back of her wrist, trying to clear away the tears. Dee retrieves her discarded shirt, and Kara takes it, giving her a faint smile in thanks.

“Oh thank the gods,” Cottle’s voice cuts in from the speakers. “I was worried for a minute that I’d have to turn a hose on you two so I could run this next scan.” Dee hides her burning face against Kara’s shoulder until she thinks she’s regained a few shreds of composure, and then leaves to let Cottle work.

 

* * *

 

“Sam said the same thing, you know,” Kara says later as they wait.

“...what?” Dee asks, slumped in her chair, staring at the ceiling.

“When you came to get me, in the memorial hall, he was telling me…” Kara’s mouth twists in something like a smile. “He was saying that he didn’t care if I was a cylon. That it wouldn’t change anything between us. That he still loved me, no matter what.”

“Sounds like Sam,” Dee says. “Not me, though. I _do_ care whether you’re a cylon. I’ll be royally pissed at you if you really have been lying to us this whole time. I’ll take you down myself before I let you pull a Boomer on us.”

She doesn’t think about holding the Admiral’s slack hand, the pool of blood around his body glowing unnaturally bright, lit from below by the command station. Kara would _never_.

 _Her_ Kara would never.

“That’s more like it.” Kara snorts. “I told Sam that if I found out he was a cylon, I’d put a bullet between his eyes. Then the ship jumped and I— I started losing it.” That explains the state Dee had found them in: tense, anxious, Kara coiled as if about to flare into violence. In an echo of that moment, Kara hunches over her knees, arms tucked close across her midsection. “The ringing... the way to Earth... it’s getting weaker. It was so _clear,_ like it was coming from the next room. ...I can feel it slipping away. Even without jumping, as we move, it’s fading away. If we keep jumping, it’ll be gone, and we’ll never find it again. I don’t— I don’t know what I’ll do, I can’t just _sit_ here—”

Dee faintly hears the familiar rumble of the Admiral’s voice out in the hall, and gets to her feet. “You might not have to much longer,” she says. “Gods willing.”

Kara shoots her an uneasy glance, but pulls her shoulders back and her spine straight nonetheless.

 

* * *

 

“See, there and there,” Cottle says, pointing at the films. Dee doesn’t know what they’re looking at, but she trusts the doc enough to let him handle this part. Beside her, Kara looks strung out, vibrating like a plucked wire, even her desperation made more intense by exhaustion somehow.

“What am I looking at?” the Admiral asks.

Cottle takes a breath, and pauses. “Long answer or short?” he says.

“ _Short,_ ” President Roslin says with emphasis.

“Something’s happening in your homing pigeon’s brain every time we jump,” Cottle says.

“...something?” the Admiral asks.

“I’ll be damned if I know what’s causing it, but I don’t think it’s psychosomatic, either; this spike here in the parietal lobe occurred _before_ the anxiety response.”

Roslin steps forward, hmm’ing to herself a little as she peers at the scans. “It’s still… all in her head,” she muses aloud, and Dee feels Kara bristle beside her.

“With all due respect, Madam President,” Cottle says, “Everything we experience is all in our head. In a manner of speaking. Just because it happens there doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

Roslin gives him a sharp, sidelong frown.

“Madam President,” Kara says, her voice stripped bare and raw, naked pleading in her eyes like Dee’s never seen before. “Please. You… you had a vision once, remember? The Arrow, the Temple. I went down to that planet with you and it was a frakking toaster party. A lot of good people died, remember?”

Roslin stares back at her, blinks once and then twice before responding. “...yes, I do.” Giving nothing away.

“I _trusted_ you,” Kara says. “On a vision. That’s it: a _vision!”_ She shows a flash of teeth, a moment of frustrated snarling before she pulls it back, swallows it down. “I _saw_ Earth. I saw it with my own eyes. And it’s calling me back.” Her voice raises, turns to iron, to steel, adamant: _“We’re going the wrong way._ ...why can’t you trust me?”

“Starbuck, that’s enough,” the Admiral says, and she whirls on him.

“If you think I’m a cylon, then shoot me. Throw me out the airlock.” Adama wouldn’t, but the president would, and so Kara turns back to her. “I’m no more a cylon than you are, and you know it.”

“I wish I did,” Roslin says, finally.

Kara looks incredulous. She’s burning now, blazing so bright that Dee can hardly stand to look at her without aching in sympathy. “I’ve put my life on the line for this frakking ship. I’ve ate, slept, and fought next to the people I love, I have pissed off my friends. I’ve broken more rules than I followed. I frakked up, okay? I messed up! But it’s _all that I have._ ” Her voice drops again, almost a whisper but for the certainty giving it strength. “These people are my _family…_ and none of us belong here.”

This hits Dee right in the gut, and she looks around: Kara, Adama, Roslin. _All of us, family,_ she thinks. Suddenly, she misses Lee – Sam should be here, too, but Lee’s absence feels like she’s woken up without a limb. He was always better with words, the way Dee is with numbers, the way Kara is with a Viper, the way Sam inhabits his body: effortless, deft, invincible.

The Admiral looks at Dee, then. “What do you say, Lieutenant?” Dee appreciates that he’s deliberately given her so much time with Kara, but there’s another side to that generosity: he expects her to report on what she’s observed honestly. It’s a hell of a responsibility.

 _I’ll have to be enough,_ Dee thinks. _I have to try._ She takes a deep breath. “May I speak freely, sir?” she asks. Roslin blinks at her.

“Go ahead, Dee,” the Admiral says, his face shuttered.

“Ma’am,” Dee starts, then swallows, lifting her chin. “Laura.” If Roslin was surprised before, she’s downright shocked now. But Dee lets the moment hang there, lets _Laura_ remember the last time Dee called her that name. Lets her remember what Dee – what _they_ – did every day for months on New Caprica, what she did every night, working for the Resistance. How far Dee’s willing to go for her family. Laura’s eyes flicker, just a little, and the hard line of her mouth softens by a fraction, grudgingly, and she nods. “I truly believe that this is my wife, and I believe that she’s who she says she is. But what I believe isn’t important. We have _proof_ that Kara’s not making this up. She feels something, _senses_ something that we can see, right there. You don’t have to trust that it’ll lead us to Earth. I only need you to believe that something out there is _hurting my wife,_ and I want to find out what it is. Just… let us track it down. _Please.”_

Roslin smiles. It’s not a _nice_ smile, but neither is it cruel. It’s simply… there, like she’s too busy weighing the odds to do more than move her mouth. “...Bill?” she asks, tilting her head towards him but not looking away from Dee.

 _Family,_ Dee thinks again, in something close to prayer. _All of us, family, and none of us belong here._ Under Adama’s scrutiny, she tries to radiate certainty, assurance, resolve, her posture unyielding.

The Admiral’s gaze turns inward, thoughtful. “...Dee brings up a good point. Not knowing what’s causing this could create a fatal blind spot at the worst possible moment. I’d rather find out what’s done this to one of my pilots,” and his glance lingers on Kara, on Dee, the unspoken words _one of my daughters_ hanging in the air, “than get bit on the ass by an unknown unknown later on.”

Roslin hums thoughtfully again, staring at the scans for another minute, tapping her forefinger against her lips. “...what would you need? _Hypothetically,”_ the President asks the Admiral, and Dee’s forgotten what relief felt like until right this minute, tension draining from her bones in a rush, leaving her giddy and light-headed.

Kara’s hand finds Dee’s, squeezing hard, and now – at last – she looks like a woman who’s cheated death _and knows it._

 

 

 

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The basic (non-personalized) tattoo design as described in the text can be found on [the main page for this series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/41303).


	2. The Demetrius Mission

 

“I want to pick up a few things before we head out,” Kara says, starting off down the hall before Dee can even get her head on straight. She hadn’t really thought ‘what next?’ because ‘ _Get Kara back’_ keeps landing on her mental checklist, and it’s always been followed by _‘...and get home.’_ All Dee wants now is to crawl into a bunk with her wife, pull the curtains shut, and sleep. "—my rack, or back at your place?” Kara’s saying like Dee had made that wish aloud. “...what is it?”

“I—” Dee starts before her voice runs out, feet likewise trailing to a stop at the next junction. She braces herself and tries again. “I’m not sure where your stuff went. I’m sorry, I should’ve...”

Kara turns, catching sight of Dee’s expression, and comes back, her brows drawn together like Dee’s speaking Old Gemenese. “...Dee,” she says slowly. “What happened while I was gone?”

“While you were dead,” Dee corrects, then feels that same surge of intensity that had taken over when she’d first spotted Kara on the hangar deck, impossibly alive again. “While you were _dead,”_ she snaps, “Sam drank himself into a hole every night and spent most of his downtime avoiding Lee – which, you know, got easier after Lee decided to frak off and play defense attorney for Gaius frakking Baltar… Lee was _so_ good at that he gave up his commission, and then I had to walk away because I couldn’t stand to look at him anymore.” Dee’s glad the hallway is empty this early in the morning, because she probably couldn’t stand to do this in front of an audience, but she can’t keep it from bubbling up, either. “What happened while you were _‘gone’?_ The whole frakking world kept ending, over and over, because that’s all it ever seems to do nowadays.”

During all this, Kara’s face shifts through shades of bewilderment, incredulity, and then something dense and trembling that Dee can’t name until Kara’s expression fragments into mirth. Dee feels Kara’s too-loud guffaw batter her ears like a thunderclap, and all she can do is stare back at her wife in shock.

“I’m sorry,” Kara says, voice high as she flaps one hand in the air between them. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know you’re mad at me, and I promise, I swear to the gods, Dee, you have every right to be and I’m willing to spend as much time in the doghouse as it takes to make it up to you, but–” a sniggering breath escapes her before she gets herself under control again, “–if you wanted to make up a story to twist the knife, you probably shouldn’t have included Lee giving up his wings to, what? Be a _lawyer_ for _Baltar?”_ Kara dissolves into giggles before wheezing, “...and you _leaving_ him? Oh gods, ow.” She puts a hand over her ribs.

“Baltar was found not guilty,” Dee tells her. “And the President’s cancer’s come back.”

Kara straightens up again, her humor slowly dissipating like morning fog. “...okay, see, that’s less funny. Dee, are you—? Are you frakking _kidding_ me? Please, _please_ tell me this is a bad joke.”

Dee simply returns her stare, waiting quietly. When Kara’s expression goes vaguely nauseous, Dee finally replies, “...I’m sorry. There are probably better ways I could have told you.”

“You’re godsdamned right there were,” Kara paces, one hand propped on her hip and the other splayed out over her face, middle finger and thumb pressed against her temples. “I can’t believe _Sam_ didn’t tell me. I married a pack of morons,” she mutters, half to herself, then shoots Dee a fleeting glare. “What—?” she starts, then cuts herself off, starts again, “I don’t have time for this, but _where are they?”_

Dee can’t say for sure where Sam is; the last time she'd seen him, the XO had dragged him off, the gods only knew why. Lee’s scheduled to leave for Colonial One tomorrow, unless he changed his plans after Kara’s reappearance. Today he’ll probably be packing the last of his things and making his last rounds.

“We should start in our… our _old_ quarters,” she suggests, and Kara nods, letting Dee lead the way.

 

***

 

When they arrive, the door is ajar and the light is on, low voices blending in a familiar cadence. Dee’s heart leaps and trips, the unexpected sense of _home_ filling her lungs and choking her with futile hope.

“Come on, Sam,” Lee is saying, “Just—” Whatever else he was going to say gets cut off by a thump and the scrape of furniture. Kara must not catch it, less used to relying on her sense of hearing for guidance, because her steps don’t falter as she pushes open the hatch.

Lee’s on his back, shoved down on the table, Sam leaning over him with a hand on his throat. Lee has one hand around Sam’s wrist, the other fisted in his tanks, keeping him close. The moment is shockingly intimate, suspended between violence and something more provocative.

“What the frak?” Kara asks while Dee's still staring. Sam steps back, hands lifting for a second like he’s at gunpoint, and Lee scrambles to his feet, pulling his civvie suit jacket back into place across his shoulders. “Much as I can appreciate the desire to strangle Lee, I'd be careful. I hear his wife’s a bitch.”

The flicker of an incredulous smile flits across Sam’s face, and Lee looks up, expression both baffled and faintly appalled. Sam says, his voice too casual, too light, “Well hell, if we’d known you’d get pardoned this soon, we’d have waited up for you.”

Dee rolls her eyes. “Sorry to barge in, but you left the door open.”

“ _I’m_ not sorry,” Kara says. “Because whatever’s going on, I don’t have time to let you two work it out. I’m leaving in an hour, I’ve got shit to do, and I can’t do it when you three—”

“What?” Lee exclaims.

“Leaving _where?_ ” Sam says at the same time. “We just got you _back_ , you can’t just—”

“We’re going to find Earth,” Dee says, losing patience.

There’s a long pause. Kara’s face splits in a slow grin. “...we?” she echoes.

“...yeah,” Dee says. She hadn’t known she’d made the decision until she’d said it, but it feels right. “I’m going with you.” She and Kara take turns explaining about the Demetrius to Lee and to Sam.

“I’m going, too,” Sam says finally.

Lee looks more reluctant. “This plan is insane,” he says. “None of you should be going.”

“I don’t have any choice, Lee, do you get that?” Kara says, the intensity from before rising in her voice. “I don’t even have time to _explain_ it, I should be on my way already, I should have been doing this before the Galactica jumped from the Nebula the first time. We’ve been going the wrong way for so long it’s like… hearing music in a hurricane, faint shreds all I have left, and I have to find it again or I’ll lose it for good.”

Sam has guarded understanding in his gaze. “...yeah, all right. When do we leave?”

Meanwhile, Lee looks betrayed. “Don’t,” he says, and Dee can hear his heart breaking. “I can’t go with you, and I can’t watch you leave again.” What he means is: _I can’t watch you all leave me again._

Dee steps close to Sam, drops her voice. “Stay,” she says. “I’ll bring her home. Just like before, I promise.” Just like New Caprica. Just like the algae planet. The only time she’d failed was when she hadn’t been there in person. She won’t let that happen again.

Sam will be a distraction; knowing that Lee has been left alone will be a distraction. Dee is too tired for distractions. Being with Kara, going on this half-baked quest will be difficult enough. She can’t _not_ go, but she needs to do it on her own terms.

“ _Please_ ,” she says to Sam, putting everything she can into that one syllable.

"Frak," he says, voice harsh and mutinous. He raises his voice again, points at Kara. “If you don’t come back, we’re coming after you.”

“ _That_ I can agree with,” Lee says. Dee looks over at him. He’s got his hand on Kara’s arm, like a tether, like an anchor. And then he lets go.

Dee envies him that strength.

 

***

 

The Admiral sees them off; the president doesn’t. Dee is glad to see that Helo’s volunteered, finds it curious but not surprising to see Athena there, too. Gaeta’s presence is more unexpected, but seeing him standing next to Fischer and Showboat is a mixed blessing.

Kara beams at Hotdog and Dragon. “Should have known you two couldn’t resist a little excitement,” she says. “And what, did you lose a bet, Gonzo?”

“Something like that,” he says, shrugging with his own poorly-hidden grin.

Sam folds Dee into his arms like he doesn’t ever think he’ll get the chance again. “Earth or no, bring her back, Dee,” he says into her hair. It means _come back with her_ as much as it does _make sure she comes back_.

“I will,” Dee says, pulling back to give him a smile. He frames her face in his palms and kisses her, sweet and lingering. When it’s over, he looks at her, something raw in his gaze.

“I love you,” he says, and her breath catches. “I… I wanted to make sure I said it out loud for once. In case I never get another chance.”

“I love you, too,” she tells him. “We can say it again when I get back.”

“Yeah, sure,” he tells her, clearly not believing it. She wonders what he thinks is going to happen between then and now. Any number of calamities could befall the Fleet, the Demetrius, but his gloom has always been reserved for personal grief, for smaller-scale tragedies, even while he maintains the conviction that the universe can keep ticking without that which he cannot.

“Keep an eye on the Adama boys for me,” she says, not knowing what else to say. “You know they can’t go a week without getting into a fight.”

Sam gives her an unconvincing smile, but she lets it slide. “I’ll do what I can,” he tells her, and she steps back, giving him a nudge towards Kara.

The Admiral makes his way over. “You know I don’t need a babysitter, right?” he grumbles, but there’s no real rancor in it.

“Oh, sure,” she says, “but Sam needs something to keep him busy or he’ll be crawling up the bulkheads within a day.”

The Admiral nods absently, looking down. When he meets her eyes again, his blue eyes are dark and sad. “I don’t like giving orders to retreat,” he says, “but at the first sign of trouble, you jump right back to the rendezvous point, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Dee says, feeling tears prick her eyes. She blinks them back, and finds herself pulled into a rough, brusque hug that’s over before she can register her own astonishment.

Lee arrives so late that Dee had started to think he wouldn’t come at all. Sam’s wrapping Kara up in one final, immense embrace when Lee appears, and Dee finds herself rushing to meet him halfway. For all the urgency to her steps, though, she has a hard time reaching out to actually touch him. He seems to have the same problem, one hand reaching out for hers carefully, as if he thinks she’ll pull away.

“You, ah,” he says, clearing his throat, “you were supposed to warn me the next time you were going to run off, weren’t you?” She remembers: that's the promise she’d made after the algae planet, after they’d argued and reconciled.

Dee smooths her free hand down the lapel of his suit, emphasizing his lack of uniform, straightens the Caprican pin, symbol of his impending role as a member of the Quorum. “And you were supposed to warn me before you did anything noble and upstanding,” she reminds him. “I’m pretty sure it's too late for both of us.”

“Maybe,” he says, giving her a searching look, “...or maybe if Kara does lead the way to Earth, we can all get a fresh start.”

“We'll see,” she says. It's not a promise; they've broken too many of those lately, between them both. But at least it's honest.

When they’re all ready to go, the crew of the Demetrius lines up on the deck at attention. “You know your mission,” the Admiral tells them. “You have your orders. Go with the Gods, and return with good news.”

 

***

 

Dee hates the Demetrius; they all do. It’s dark and cramped and stinks to high heaven, and no amount of fiddling with the environmental controls makes it any less hot and humid. The Admiral gave them sixty days, but Dee is fraying by day ten, nearly numb by twenty.

Kara is… strange. Herself, but not. Haphazard but driven single-mindedly towards a goal she can’t describe but senses inchoately. It’s nothing like the cold stare Dee had seen in Boomer’s eyes right before she’d shot the old man, miles away from the fervent faith of the Sixes or the matter-of-factness of the Fours. Nothing like any of the cylons, really.

Except maybe Leoben, and Dee shoves away the thought immediately, but not before it sends a shudder crawling down her spine and into her gut. She can feel it curl there, alongside all her other suspicions and misgivings and grief. It’s all nearly physically nauseating, sometimes, when she’s in her bunk, trying (often unsuccessfully) to sleep.

That could be the smell of the place, though. It permeates everything, their clothes, their food, the water they drink. Dee’s appetite wanes with worry and preoccupation, and she catches Gaeta giving her worried looks in the common room they use as mess and for every other kind of off-duty gathering. No one thought to bring cards, so they’ve trimmed down pages from old Colony system maps, shipping lanes that will never be used again scribbled over with princes and pips.

Gaeta gives Dee looks a lot; she can’t really blame him. They all trade glances, sometimes, when Kara’s particularly wild-eyed about a new course heading. It’s fine for now, it is. She’s not driving them through pulsars or into asteroid fields; she’s not giving any orders that are, strictly speaking, unreasonable for a blind scouting mission.

Kara doesn’t give many orders at all, actually. She sometimes mutters over maps and new scanner data, but she doesn’t really respond, even when Dee tries to get her to talk about something that’s not just, y’know, _Earth_.

Dee does sometimes ask about Earth. The handful of times she’s curled up on Kara’s rack, listening to her wife talk about blue skies and open air and sunshine and greens that aren’t olive drab, are the only times she’s gotten any decent sleep on this ship. It doesn’t happen often; between her wariness and Kara’s scatteredness and weird hours, Dee crashes in a rack in the room across the hall more often than not.

This means she’s in shared crew space a lot, and not in Kara’s isolated little bubble of intensity. When she’s on duty she can listen to empty Dradis static and the occasional chatter of bored pilots; when she’s off-duty, she can listen to the murmurs of the crew talking, complaining about worn-out parts and their shitty surroundings and speculating about their mission.

“So you think she’s a cylon?” Hotdog asks in a low voice, late one night. They probably think Dee’s asleep.

“I don’t know,” Fischer says. “You’d think if she were, something would have happened by now.”

“It could be some kind of long game,” Showboat says reluctantly, brow furrowed.

There’s a pause. “...I don’t know,” Gaeta says. “I mean, Starbuck’s never been _subtle_.”

That surprises a laugh out Gonzo, and the abrupt burst of sound effectively ends their conversation.

Dee almost feels grateful, to Fischer and to Gaeta, for defending Starbuck. Except that’s not really what they’ve done. There’s no faith there, just a wary sort of watchfulness. A “wait and see,” not “...even if she is…” Still, it makes Dee feel less alone in giving Kara a chance.

This doesn’t mean they’re happy about it, though. The restlessness that had led to the crew volunteering for the mission — seeing an opportunity to do something, to be the ones to find Earth — has curdled to unease, to discontentment. Gaeta’s guarded caution threads through with concern for Dee, with impatient irritation, with resentment at every fruitless sweep of empty space.

He’s not the only one; even Athena’s cynicism is becoming palpable, her frowns more lingering, her responses to orders crackling like dry leaves being crushed underfoot. Dee wonders what she thinks, if she knows whether Kara’s a cylon, whether she cares — and if so, _how_. She’s shown no problem defying her people before; her loyalty is to her family, the one she chose, and Kara’s only ever been counted by association to Adama and to Helo.

Dee realizes just how wrong this could go on day twenty-nine, when she sees Helo having a hushed conversation with his wife, his hands upraised in placation and Sharon’s arms crossed obdurately. Dee pauses at the other end of the corridor, knowing better than to intervene or to eavesdrop but feeling the impulses tug at her feet anyway. Sharon spots her, and ducks away, back into one of the rooms, and Helo’s expression is clouded and illegible when he looks at Dee before following his wife.

 _If this is how things are at the halfway point, we may not make it to the end unless we find something,_ Dee thinks. The knowledge tightens her throat, dries out her mouth, and she has to swallow hard against the pressure in her chest. _I need to talk to Kara._

Her knock at the hatch to the captain's cabin doesn’t get a response, but she knows Kara’s in there, so she enters anyway. _Spousal privileges have their uses_ , Dee thinks dourly.

She finds Starbuck, but the woman’s a stranger like this, consumed by whatever would-be prophet has assumed her form. She's surrounded by maps scattered across every flat surface, scrawling indecipherable notes that trail from one star cluster to the next. These quarters are the largest on the ship, which doesn’t say much, but the air seems denser than elsewhere, even the light dimmed by the thick atmosphere.

Starbuck has been painting on the walls, huge raw murals of the visions she’s described to Dee, as if she’s trying to make them real in some way, as if that will make up for not finding them. Dee’s reminded of New Caprica, when Kara had manned the painting crews for all the public buildings. She'd doodled mural proposals in bed, graphite smearing across the page and the sheets and on the side of her hand. Dee feels a stab of fury behind her sternum, resentment that they can’t have those mornings back, that this is all they’re left with. Hurt that Kara won’t even spare her a glance or a word.

“Kara,” she says, damning the unsteadiness of her voice. She tries again, adding iron, turning it to steel. “Kara, _look_ at me.”

“Yeah, hang on, I need to...” Starbuck says, not moving.

“Kara, we need to talk.” No, that’s not right. _“You_ need to talk to someone. I don’t care if it’s me, talk to Helo, but you need to communicate with us. With your crew, with your—” Her voice gives out before she can say ‘family.’

_We are all family, and none of us belong here._

“Sure,” Kara says, not looking at her. “I just need to figure this out. I can, I just need time. Some quiet. So I can find it again.”

“It’s been a month, Kara. Maybe it’s not time you need, but help. That’s what we’re all here for, what we all want to do.” That might be stretching it a bit, but Dee leaves it as it is.

“I don’t need _help_ , Dee,” Kara mutters, annoyed. “Not from you, not from Helo, not from the crew. If you want to help, get the frak out and give me some _space_ , all right?”

Dee snaps, pulls the palette knife from Kara’s hand, taking a step back when she twists, reaching to steal it back. There’s paint on Kara’s face, in her hair, streaked up her arms like licks of flame, yellow and orange and white. Like she’s burning up, trying to get her visions out of her mind and into some form she can articulate, share, make _real_.

Kara climbs out of the rack, blazing. Dee backs away, but doesn’t back down, squaring her jaw. The knife clatters to the deck as Kara rushes her, but that was only ever an excuse. Her back hits the bulkhead, Kara’s hands around her wrists, pinning her to the wall.

“Why are you here, Dee?” Kara breathes into the scant space between them. “Gonna give me one of your pretty speeches, try to get me to snap out of it, try to bring me home?” Her voice turns into a snarl, a sneer. “When are you gonna realize there isn’t anything left to bring back? I’m not the same girl you married; she died a long time ago.” Her face turns, her lips ghosting along Dee’s cheek, her ear. “You should get out, Dee, you should run, you should get away from me, because I don’t know what I am anymore and I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m going to do, but you probably don’t want to be here when I figure it out.”

Dee had never really needed Lee’s guidance, during their early courtship, but she’d learned a few tricks in their sparring sessions nonetheless. She hooks a leg around Kara’s bad knee and twists, surging forward until they’ve both hit the deck in a tangle. The scramble that follows is sloppy, shins banging into furniture, elbows knocking into ribs, skin slick from paint and sweat.

Kara’s not used to opponents smaller than her; she’s always fought above her weight class, so she isn’t prepared for Dee’s tactics.

“Stop,” Dee says, kneeling on the small of Kara’s spine, pinning one arm on the deck and the other twisted behind her back. She can see the flash of Kara’s smile, half-hidden by her shoulder, so she’s prepared for the sudden struggle that follows and holds fast. “ _Stop._ You think you’re the only one that’s changed? I’m not the girl you married either. She died on New Caprica, back in the mud, and yeah, it’s not as flashy as a flaming Viper, but not all of us can be drama queens.” Kara shudders under her, like she’s laughing, like she’s sobbing, and Dee’s too far gone to care which it is. “I’m not here to _save_ you, Kara. I’m not here to bring you home. I couldn’t tell you where home was even if I knew we still had one out there.”

“Then why _are_ you here,” Kara mutters, her cheek still mashed against the deckplates.

“I’m here because you said _you_ knew where home was, where _Earth_ is,” Dee says, leaning back, releasing Kara’s arms, blowing a fallen lock of hair out of her face. “I’m here to make sure you don’t pull a Boomer on us. And I’m here because even if we’ve both changed, you’re still my _wife,_ and that means something to me, even if you don’t give a frak.”

Kara pulls her arms in, rolling her wrenched shoulder. Her hips twist, and Dee shifts her leg so that as Kara turns over, she winds up straddling Kara’s lap.

Propped on her elbows, Kara glowers at her, but she doesn’t seem like she’s about to try to fight Dee off again. “You want to talk about our marriage now?” she asks. “’cause from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look so much like you ran after me as you ran from Lee. Too _scared_ to face—” The rest of her sentence gets cut off in a laugh as Dee grabs the front of her tanks in a fist. “It’s not like our marriage was ever as much about you and me as it was about him, huh?” Her smile is wide and sharp, and Dee wants to hit her, bust her nose or her lip, but she knows that Kara would only laugh again if she did. “Admit it, you never liked _me_ so much as you liked the idea of stealing something he loved more than you, even if the theft was just in temporary installments.”

Dee shoves her back to the deck, forearm against her collarbone. She can feel Kara’s lungs working, her pulse pounding. “Shut up,” she says through her teeth.

“Make me,” Kara says, still grinning. “Make me _feel_ something. Prove me wrong, prove that you _feel—_ ”

Dee breaks, hating herself for it, for letting Kara get to her, manipulate her so crassly, but then, a part of her has wanted this since she heard Kara’s laugh over her headset, back at the nebula. She pins Kara against the deck, swallowing whatever additional taunts her wife has readied on her tongue.

 _It's going to be okay,_ Kara had said, and _It really is me,_ and Dee had both rejoiced and resented the miracle.

Kara’s hands come up to shove at Dee’s tanks, and Dee rears back to strip them off, hair going everywhere. She spits errant strands out of her mouth and catches Kara’s hands as she reaches for Dee’s bra, slamming her back against the deck again. Paint streaks across her palms, tacky and half dry, as she pulls Kara’s hands above her head.

It hadn’t been fair, that they’d all fallen apart only to have Kara come back from the dead like it was nothing. Laughing like it was _funny_.

She’s still laughing now, silent, but it’s there dancing in her eyes, trembling through her breath, and Dee bends down to sink her teeth in Kara’s neck just to hear her gasp. “Dee—” Kara says, shifting.

“Shut up,” Dee says, and it turns into a fight again, clothing the first casualties and bruises rising under open, eager mouths and grasping hands instead of fists. Dee drags Kara’s head back with a hand tangled in her hair, and Kara whines as she nips at her collarbone.

Kara gets a leg under her, foot planted on the floor, and she bucks hard, Dee tumbling sideways off her lap, landing hard on one hip. There’s a thump as Kara kicks off her boots. Dee scrabbles at her shoulders, sweat-slippery beneath her grip, and she catches the straps of Kara’s tanks instead, pulling them off as Kara wriggles away and down.

 _Not the girl I married,_ Dee thinks, staring down at Kara, who smirks at her past dishevelled hair and with flames of paint licking around her wrists as she thumbs the clasp to Dee’s pants. _Exactly the girl I married,_ she thinks, _I just hadn’t met her yet,_ and when Kara tugs, she lifts her hips so that Kara can peel her bare.

 

***

 

“...we did get married, didn’t we?” Kara murmurs, lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, running her fingertips over the trailing ends of Dee’s hair absently. “I mean, I didn’t dream that, right? It actually happened.”

Dee shifts to settle onto her back. “Pretty sure, yeah, unless you have another explanation for how we got our ink.”

Kara shrugs. “I don’t know. Everything seems different, somehow.” She shakes her head. “I feel… disconnected. Like I’m not really here, or like everything’s a memory.”

“...all of this has happened before,” Dee muses, staring up at the ceiling over the bunk, her arm pressed against Kara’s.

Kara laughs hollowly. “Wanna know when I first thought about marrying you?” she asks.

Dee grins up at the near-abstract painting above their heads. “I always thought you woke up still drunk, the morning you proposed,” she says, and she hears Kara snort.

“No,” Kara says. “It was in the infirmary, just after I shot Lee.” Dee’s smile fades, and her heart staggers in her chest. “I shot him, and part of me wasn’t surprised. All I’ve ever done is hurt him and then drag him right back into my crosshairs. And— well, you know Lee. He was always looking for, gods, something he should have _known_ I was never gonna be able to give him. So when I went to visit him after the surgery and you were already there, all I could think was, _Of course. She’s perfect. Hell, even I’d marry her._ ”

Dee’s not sure what to say to this. She’s pretty sure Kara’s not really expecting a response.

“I thought… He’d found you, and then I had Sam, and… I don’t know. I figured we all had what we needed, but I still _wanted_. And at Groundbreaking, you… you were supposed to be the reasonable one, supposed to say no, but you didn’t. Then during the Occupation, you… I still don’t know why you did what you did, Dee. I didn’t— I don’t deserve that kind of…” She swallows hard. “I always knew I was gonna hurt Lee, and probably Sam, but. I didn’t realize I was gonna hurt you, too.”

“You act like I didn’t know,” Dee points out. “Like I didn’t have a say. I did. I do. I chose this.” She doesn’t say _I chose you_ , because this is bigger than just her and Kara.

“...yeah,” Kara says. “Still, it’s almost like I got sent back to… I don’t know, atone, maybe. Apologize. But all I feel is numb. Maybe I should just tell you to stop running after me. You shouldn’t get hurt anymore, not on my account.”

“Yeah, because you’re one to give advice about quitting when things get rough,” Dee says, rolling her eyes. “If you wanted to play solitary martyr, you picked the wrong people to marry. Which reminds me, I ought to double-check the storage compartments to see if Sam and Lee stowed away.” She puts the back of her hand over her eyes, blocking out the lights. “...like I said, I’m not here to save you. I _do_ want to see if you can bring us to Earth. And maybe, yeah, I did want to get away from Lee, from Sam, from the Galactica, from counting ships in the Fleet and listening to CAPs and filing dailies. My last shore leave was _New Caprica_ , for gods’ sakes. Can you really blame me for wanting a break?”

“Hell of a ‘break,’ Dee,” Kara says, her sharp exhale almost a laugh. “Following your possibly-a-toaster, definitely-crazy, back-from-the-dead wife into unknown space looking for a mythical thirteenth Colony…”

“It’s definitely not boring, I’ll give you that,” Dee comments, and then Kara does laugh.

 

***

 

Dee wakes up to the staticy sound of Gaeta’s voice over the PA system. “Action stations, action stations,” he says. “Set condition one throughout the ship. This is not a drill.” She’s on her feet and moving before he repeats the message. She yanks the elastic out of her hair and sticks it between her teeth, futilely trying to smooth it back into its usual neat ponytail, and gives up. Fighting the humidity here is a losing battle, and she’s got better things to do with her time. She does her best to catch all the ends in a messy bun and looks around for her bra.

Starbuck’s already up, muttering curses under her breath as she sorts through the clothing on the floor. Dee catches the tanks Kara flings over her shoulder, and shimmies into them. Glad that nobody wears jackets on this stinking heap, she buttons her BDU pants and steps into her boots simultaneously.

Kara yelps, hopping back on one foot and glaring at the deck. “What the frak?” she asks, stooping to pick up something that glints dully in the amber light. “How did this get here?”

“Oh,” Dee says, reaching for it. “It’s the Admiral’s, I keep meaning to give it back to him…”

Kara doesn’t notice her gesture, turning it over in her hand. “I gave this to him for his ship… Before I— _before_.” She doesn’t need to clarify when. “How did you get it?”

“Same way you just found it,” Dee says. “Practically tripped on it. His ship was in rough shape. After. It must have fallen.” Kara’s jaw clenches, and Dee looks away, busies herself with her clothes, adding, “You should keep it. Give it back to him when we get back.”

“Yeah,” Kara says, tucking it into her pocket. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

Dee yanks her laces tight and tucks them into the tops of her boots to tie properly later. “Am I good?” Kara turns to squint at her.

“I don’t _care_ , you’re _fine_ ,” Starbuck says, and then gives her a grin as she opens the hatch. “But then, you always are.”

Dee hasn’t blushed in _ages_. She shakes her head, seeing the deflection for what it is, and shoves her wife out into the corridor ahead of her.

 

***

 

Whatever semblance of the old Kara had resurfaced, she’s gone like tylium fumes, burned away by the discovery of a heavy raider adrift in space, badly damaged and seemingly on its own. A raptor team checks it out and tows it in, and Dee is there when the marines drag its sole occupant aboard.

The Leoben is pale and weak, falling to his knees on the deck as soon as the Marines let him go. Dee sees blood matting his hair, staining his clothes in rusty blotches. She wants to throw him back out the hatch and let him drift in his broken ship until one of the machines give out, see which will yield first to the frigid apathy of space: synthetic flesh or steel.

“I knew you’d find me,” Leoben says in a ragged croak. “I didn’t expect you so soon, but I’m glad to see you.”

“The feeling’s not mutual,” Kara snaps, her lip curled, halfway between snarl and sneer, but her voice is empty. “Lock him up,” she tells the marines, starting to turn away.

As Mathias and Parr close in, Leoben’s voice raises. “I’m here to offer you a truce, Kara — the fate of both our peoples is at stake! I can help you find what you’re looking for!”

Kara pauses, frowning.

“Oh, frak me,” Dee mutters under her breath.

 

 

 

— _con't._ —


	3. Among the Cylons

 

Dee feels like she hasn’t slept in a week, her mind sluggish and her limbs leaden. Despite this, she stands vigil in the hallway outside Kara’s quarters for hours that feel like days.

Helo joins her, after a time. “Is it my turn on watch?” Dee asks. They’ve been trading off XO duties, as much for their own sakes as for regs. Helo seems glad for it, like even his broad shoulders can only carry so much.

“Nah,” he says easily. “They’ll call us if they need us.” He nudges her with an elbow. “How are you holding up?”

“I honestly don’t know how to answer that question anymore,” Dee says, giving him a weak smile. There’s a muffled thump and a clatter from the other side of the wall. Helo looks alarmed. “...yeah, that’s been happening,” Dee says. “The shouting stopped, though.” It had mostly been Kara shouting, and most of _that_ had been colorful name-calling interspersed with threats. Dee sighs, tipping her head back against the bulkhead, and looks at the grate above their head and the shadowy shapes of conduits beyond that. “Is there a membership card?” She doesn’t wait for Helo to respond before clarifying, “or maybe a support group for ‘my spouse is probably a cylon and I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it’?”

He gives a small, amused snort. “We could start one,” he suggests. “I don’t think Kara’s a cylon, though. I don’t know why I’m sure of it, but I am.” Helo may not mean it as such, but Dee feels comforted anyway.

Kara comes out of the hatch, fresh paint on her hands and dried blood on her knuckles. “Yeah, okay, let’s go,” she says.

“...go where?” Helo asks, but Kara’s already on her way to the CIC. Dee trails after them before a thought occurs to her, and she snags the first marine she finds to transfer Leoben to some supply closet in lieu of a brig.

When she catches up with the others, she can tell she’s missed some bombshell.

“...seriously?” Hotdog says. Like he’s popped a bubble, everyone starts speaking at once.

“A cylon _basestar_ ,” Sharon says. “We can’t—”

Helo steps in, between the clusters starting to form as people drift towards each other, some kind of gravity of like opinion sorting those gathered into sides. “Hang on, I’m sure there’s—”

“—can we really trust intel from—” Gaeta is saying.

“What did I miss?” Dee mutters to Fischer.

“Starbuck says there’s been a cylon civil war,” he tells her. “And there’s a frakked-up basestar out there with some kind of intel on Earth. They _need our help_.” He says this last with bewilderment and revulsion in equal measure.

Dee weaves her way around still-gathering crewmembers to Helo’s side. “Can we send a scout?” she asks him.

“We don’t need to send a scout,” Kara says. “We _are_ the scouts, that’s why we’re out here.”

“Yeah,” Helo says, answering Dee’s question, “we’ve got a raptor, maybe Sharon and I can—”

“Thanks for volunteering me,” Sharon interjects dryly, her hands on her hips. “But we’ve also got a cylon heavy out there, might be a bit less conspicuous than a colonial ship. And if I’m getting roped into this half-assed—”

“No one’s getting roped into anything,” Kara snaps, “You all volunteered, and I was put in charge.”

Helo drops his voice. “Kara,” he says, “we have the time. Just give us a few hours, hop in, hop out. That’s all.”

Kara sets her jaw, and Dee thinks she’s going to refuse. “...fine,” Kara says at last. “But if anyone’s going on that ship, it includes me.”

It’s like a band around Dee’s ribs has been cut, and she takes a deep, dizzying breath. “Okay. Okay, let’s check the raider. I’ll see if the comms and avionics are working, Gaeta, can you look over the jump drives and environmentals?”

There’s only the briefest of pauses before he nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”

“Gunny, go with them,” Helo says, gesturing to Mathias, who falls in ahead of them as Gaeta heads out, Dee grabbing a diagnostics kit from under a console on her way. The hallways are so narrow here they have to go single file to get to the fore part of the ship, where the raider’s been docked.

“Don’t worry,” Dee says to Gaeta’s back, “I don’t expect you to have to come patch up the basestar with us, too.”

“You actually want to go?” he says, shooting her a disbelieving look over his shoulder. “C’mon, Dee, you don’t really think—”

Whatever else he was about to say gets cut off by a wall of sound that knocks Dee back. For a moment it’s all shrieking metal and roaring suction and blinding light, followed quickly by darkness and quiet.

 

***

 

Dee’s ears are ringing, but she can hear distant voices beyond it. Her head feels like it’s been stuffed with gunpowder and hollowed out with fire, her brain scorched and raw.

“Dee,” she hears Kara saying. “Oh my gods, Dee, are you okay? Open your eyes, baby, c’mon, please wake up.”

“...’m fine,” she says, sitting up. The hasty movement makes her stomach do a somersault, and for a moment she tastes iron and bile. She breathes carefully for a minute, and it subsides. “What happened?”

“The cylon raider exploded,” Kara says. “We’re not sure why, but—”

“It was rigged,” Sharon interjects flatly.

“You don’t know that,” Helo says. “It was damaged when we found it.”

“Did we lose anything?” Dee asks. The Demetrius isn’t very big; a large enough explosion could rip it in half, throw their vipers off the tiny flight deck, possibly beyond retrieval.

“...Mathias,” Kara says, and the guilt is thick in her voice. “And Gaeta’s injured.”

Dee wraps her hand around Kara’s elbow with an urgent grip. _“Where is he?”_ she asks.

 

***

 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Gaeta tells her. “I’ll be fine.”

This is a lie. He’ll probably lose at least part of his left leg. And Dee doesn’t know any other way to look at him, when he’s laid up like this, skin a sickly, clammy grey. “Okay,” she says, not meaning it. “So, um. We were thinking of sending you back on the raptor.”

His hand tightens on hers, convulsively. “Can you—” he says, voice breaking. “Can you come with me? I don’t want. I don’t want them to take—”

Dee’s throat closes, and she squeezes his hand back, just as hard. His grip slackens as he drifts out again, from the pain or the drugs or both. Dee stays by his side anyway.

“You should go with him,” Kara says from the doorway. When Dee looks up at her, she sees new shadows under Kara’s eyes, her wife’s face drawn with a thousand emotions. “Cottle should take a look at your head. You were out for a while. I thought—”

“I’m fine,” Dee says, lying badly. Her head still spins if she stands up too fast. “What’s the plan?” They don’t have the raider anymore, and if the raptor’s going back to the rendezvous point...

“We’re still going to go,” Kara says. “We decrypted the info we downloaded from the data banks before the raider went up. It seems to confirm Leoben’s story.”

“So let’s ask Galactica to send reinforcements,” Dee says.

Kara shakes her head. “No, Sharon was right. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to risk anyone else. I’ve told the crew that this is an opt-in mission. A couple are going back on the raptor, but most are sticking around.” Her mouth twists, like she’s trying to smile. “I think half are staying because they’re curious, and half are staying because they think they they’ll get the chance to kick some cylon ass for what just happened.”

“Sounds like fun,” Dee says. “When do we leave?”

“The raptor leaves in an hour,” Kara says, deliberately misinterpreting the question.

“Kara—”

“I don’t want to see you getting hurt again,” Kara says. “Not for my sake.”

“It’s not for you,” Dee says. “I made promises, and I don’t intend to break any of them. So unless you want to knock me out again and make this concussion worse, I’m staying.”

“You are the most stubborn frakking woman,” Kara says, exasperated.

“In _this_ room?” Dee says, “I’m sure working on it.” Kara looks torn between a scowl and a weary smile.

“ _Frak_ ,” Kara says, and walks out. Dee takes this as a victory.

 

***

 

The image on their terminals looks like Kara’s mural. A six-pointed shooting star, falling into the gravity well of a planet, pulled towards its broad ring system. Kara had painted highlights and shadows on every rock and every bit of debris, methodically. Obsessively. Had painted every constellation in _just_ the right place.

And it’s _here_. “...holy frak,” Starbuck says, then laughs.

Leoben won’t shut up. He keeps talking through split lips, words mushy and wrong due to his broken nose, about destiny and visions. Dee shoots him a glare but he just grins at her, oblivious in his fervor. Sharon sees it, or shares Dee’s sentiments, and yanks him back and away from the control panels with a scowl.

The basestar creeps up on them slowly until it looms, until its broken arms lift over them, and their external cameras slip into its ragged shadow one by one. And then they’re there, within the cavernous hangar bay, fleshy webbing catching at the Demetrius and holding them fast in the belly of the beast.

 

***

 

It’s not what Dee expected, from everything else she’s seen of cylon-built spaces. But then, the tents of New Caprica didn’t resemble the staterooms on Cloud Nine or the CIC of Pegasus, either. The precise angles of the basestar corridors, the gleaming floors, the bright light emanating from every direction... Strangely, all of it reminds Dee of a cathedral.

The cylon bodies seem like blasphemy, broken humanoid figures and crumpled scrap lying in stark contrast to the clean architecture. The centurions are carrying them one at a time, from all over the ship towards the same place. Dee and the others from the Demetrius pass the centurions’ destination on their way to meet the rebel cylon leaders; she glimpses a large room with rows of still forms laid neatly out on the floor, hands folded on their chest in an attitude of prayer. There are tokens along the wall near the doorway, personal effects and small flickering lights that resemble candles.

It’s these cylons’ version of a memorial hallway. Dee feels very small, and looks away.

 

***

 

The rebels seem as inwardly contentious as the crew of the Demetrius had been. Similarly, they close ranks when faced with the prospect of an enemy in their midst. There are only a handful of outcomes to their predicament, though, and only one that doesn’t end in further bloodshed.

Dee stays out of it, lets them posture and fight while she nurses the headache that’s creeping up on her despite the pills she’d taken from the medkit on the way over. There are rows of scrolling symbols projected on the walls, numbers or letters in a language she can’t read and which go too fast for her to process properly anyway. She can sense a pattern there, though, and there’s a strange familiarity about it that tugs at her, low in the gut.

Dee lets it wash over her, soothing and hypnotic.

“...Dee?” Kara says.

She blinks back to herself. “Yeah?”

“...can you help with connecting their systems to ours?”

Dee’s patched and jury-rigged odd systems together before, has installed replacement components from the Galactica onto the Pegasus and vice versa when needed, even helped Gaeta network the Galactica’s memory banks. Everyone in a CIC needs to know the basics, and the end of the worlds stretched everyone beyond the requirements of their individual duty stations. Still, this is something entirely new. Dee looks over at Sharon, who nods support.

“Sure thing, where do we start?”

 

***

 

“...I remember you,” the Eight says, when Dee comes down the Demetrius’ loading ramp and into the hangar. The place still gives her the creeps, but she gives herself credit for not spooking at the unexpected company.

All the hairs on her arms lift, electric. “...Boomer?” she asks, glad she's wearing her sidearm, just in case.

The Eight wrinkles her nose, shaking her head. She looks like Hera, refusing a meal. Visceral rejection. “Boomer betrayed us, like she betrayed you. I’m nothing like her. But you can’t tell, can you?”

Dee ducks her head, resettling the coils of cable hung over her shoulder with a shrug. “...yeah, sorry about that.” She’s had to deal with it, too. People used to hear her rural Sagittaron accent and instantly stopped seeing her as an equal. She’d ironed it out after a few months at the Academy, flattening her vowels, paying better attention to the consonants at the end of words. Dropping the slang had been harder, but she’d gotten the hang of it. “I’m not used to looking that close. What with the constant running for my life and all.”

“You _interrogated_ me,” the Eight says, angry now. “You _watched_ them _hurt_ me.”

 _...oh, frak,_ Dee thinks. New Caprica still haunts her, both the things she’d done and the things she’d seen. Sometimes it seems like an extended nightmare, where her body had kept moving but her mind had just been trapped in a cold, soundproof box, screaming silently when it wasn’t slowly going numb.

“...yeah,” she says at last. “I’m sure we all did things we’re not proud of, down there. Didn’t you?”

The Eight’s gaze drops, and Dee knows she’s scored a hit. She doesn’t press it, doesn’t expect any of them will ever offer an apology for the Occupation, for the blood on their hands. All they can do is move forward. Deal with what’s in front of them. Make better choices next time.

Kara comes around the corner with a frown. “Everything all right out here?”

“Yeah, we’re good,” Dee answers. “Just finishing up.”

The Eight blinks at her, then disappears without a word.

 

***

 

“...prodigal archer bent like a bow and strung like a wire meant to break save for uncalculated capacity. Transcription error. Error. Error… Cascade failure. Isolating flawed subroutines. Reformulating idempotent operations. Rewriting. Rewiring. Restarting.”

There is a woman — _part of what looks like a woman_ — plugged into the floor, up to her neck in cloudy, viscous liquid, staring up into the middle distance. She speaks, and speaks, and speaks:

“Redundancy established in case of repeat system failure; no closed system is guaranteed indefinite survival. Testing new connections. Bringing backup processors online. Testing. Testing. Testing… Primary connections confirmed. Secondary connections confirmed. Tertiary connections confirmed. Initiating remote synchronization. Initiating data transfer.” There is a pause, then the half-woman inhales deeply as if she’s just surfaced from the bottom of the ocean. “ _...jump!_ ”

Dee’s stomach turns over, and she leaves Kara alone with the… _‘Hybrid.’_

They’re almost to the Fleet, anyway. Almost back to the closest thing to home they have left.

 

***

 

After the basestar, Galactica’s hangar deck seems very scruffy, very scuffed. Very human. Dee couldn’t be happier to see it.

Kara’s giving the rough version of her report to the Admiral, and he’s frowning. Over his shoulder, Dee spots Tigh and Tyrol trading frowns. After their time on New Caprica, she’s not surprised that they would share misgivings about an alliance with the cylons. _Any_ cylons.

It’s not her decision to make, and she grateful for it. She looks for familiar faces in the crowd, and spies Sam in the back. It’s so crowded he doesn’t see her until she’s right next to him, already wrapping her arms around him. “Hey,” he says, laughing, squeezing her shoulders with one arm and pressing a kiss against her hair. “I missed you, too. I heard you were hurt?”

“Hmm,” she says, shrugging. “I’m okay. Who ratted me out?”

“I went to see Gaeta,” Sam tells her.

“How is he?” Dee asks, looking up at him.

His face tells her all she needs to know. “They had to amputate.”

“I want to see him. And Lee, where is Lee?”

“Probably bickering with the Quorum,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. “I bet they’re _loving_ having a basestar in their backyards.”

“Quorum Rep,” Dee says, sounding it out in her head. She finds that she’s not baffled by Lee’s career decisions anymore. She still doesn’t know if she agrees with them, but it’s just like Lee to jump from wrangling pilots to corralling politicians. A thought occurs to her. “...oh, gods, we’re political spouses. Oh, _no_.”

“I have already been to one truly painful dinner with the president, the vice president, Tory Foster, the Admiral, and our husband,” Sam tells her. “It’s your turn now.”

“Let Starbuck take a turn, they might stop inviting us,” Dee suggests.

Sam smothers a laugh. “We’re not going to pry her away from debriefings with the Admiral for a while, huh?”

“...probably not,” Dee says.

“Let’s uh,” Sam says. “Wanna take a walk?” He seems nervous, like he wants to avoid someone. Dee glances around, sees Tigh glowering at them.

“Did you piss off the XO while I was gone?” she asks as they duck out an access hatch and into one of the hallways through the materiel storage bays.

“Not that I know of,” Sam says. “Hey, is it true that the cylons know who the Final Five are?”

“More gossip from Gaeta?” Dee guesses, and he nods before climbing a ladder to the next deck. “They have this hybrid, she’s supposed to see stuff. Most of what she says are sysop reports and gibberish, but she apparently said something about waking up a Three who knows?” She shrugs. “It’s more Arrow of Apollo, Temple of Athena, prophecies and scriptures and visions and whatever. It all seems like noise, but people keep pulling signals out of it anyway, so I’m just gonna go along with it. It’s not any more absurd than anything else we’ve done.”

He’s led them through the halls to their old quarters, and when they enter, Dee can tell that it’s being used again. Sam’s flight suit hangs in the locker, and there’s a law book half-hidden in the back corner of the unmade bed. _Good for them,_ Dee thinks approvingly. It’ll be a while before she and Lee will be able to reconnect, if ever, but she doesn’t want the _whole_ marriage to disintegrate.

Sam makes sure the hatch is closed and rakes his hands through his hair. “So even the cylons don’t know who the five are yet?”

“I guess not,” Dee says, leaning back against the table. “What’s wrong, Sam? Are you still worried about Kara? Because if she’s a cylon—”

“She’s not a cylon,” Sam says, then frowns. “I’m pretty sure she’s not, anyway.”

“Yeah?” Dee says, lifting an eyebrow and one corner of her mouth in amusement. “And how would you know, anyway?”

“Because you _are_ married to a cylon,” Sam says. “It’s just not Kara.”

Dee waits, expecting a punchline. Sam just stares at her, guarded terror in his gaze, genuine and real. Like she’s got her hand on an airlock key and he’s watching her through the glass.

His meaning hits her like a crack of thunder, delayed after the flash. It’s like she’s in the explosion again, ears ringing and all the air leaving her body in a rush from the impact. Her knees give out, and she manages to slide into a chair before she drops to the deck.

“...how long have you known?” she asks faintly.

“Since the nebula, right around the time Kara came back,” he replies. Not _that_ long, then. “I—” Dee holds up a hand in warning, and he falls silent.

“...does Lee know?” Dee manages at last. The sharp, broken echo of a laugh that she gets from Sam is enough of an answer. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because… because I should have been honest with you as soon as we found out, but everything happened so fast, then Kara was there and then you were both gone, and I regretted not telling you before you left, and I can’t— I _can’t_ lie to you anymore. I’m sorry. If you need to— to do your duty, I understand. I’d prefer if you didn’t, but. _Gods_. You deserved to know the truth.”

Dee folds her arms on the tabletop, letting her forehead drop to the cool metal surface. “...oh my gods, I’m going to have to lie to the _Admiral_ ,” she groans. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, just takes the chair next to her and lets her process. When she sits up, he jerks back like he’s expecting her to hit him. “...you said ‘we,’” she says. “You said ‘when _we_ found out.’ Do you know who the other four are? Are they in the Fleet? Are they on the Galactica?”

“I only know three,” Sam says, “but yeah, they’re in the Fleet. You have to understand, we all thought we were human, we had families and friends and whole lives that we lost in the Colonies and on New Caprica, just like everybody else in the Fleet. I can’t tell you who they are, that’s not mine to tell. And even if you report me, I won’t—”

“I’m not going to report you, you _ass_ ,” Dee says, kicking him in the shin. “I’m just. Frak, I thought that we’d go on the Demetrius, find Earth, finally get some room to figure our shit out.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam says.

She kicks him again without looking.

 

***

 

When Dee recovers, she gets him to tell her as much as he can, about the music and the cylon raiders retreating during the nebula skirmish. From what he lets slip, she can tell that the other three were also aboard the Galactica in that time frame, but that doesn't narrow it down much. They could be civvies from Dogsville, one of the journalists that’s always trailing after Roslin, one of the marines or deck hands… Yeah, that’s not going to make her jumpy for a while, knowing but not-knowing at once.

“You don’t have any hidden programming I need to worry about, do you?” she asks, knowing the futility of the question but needing to ask anyway.

“Not that we’re aware of,” he says. “And I’ve been keeping track, I’m not missing any time.” At some point, his hand had crept over to lace with hers. His eyes are earnest, and she knows she could do anything, _anything_ with this knowledge, and he’d accept it. Might even forgive her for it.

“You are Sam — _my_ Sam, aren’t you,” she says, not asking. His thumb rubs at her finger, over her wedding ring.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m your Sam.”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay, what’s the plan?”

He looks blankly at her. “...what plan?”

“Please tell me there’s a plan. This isn’t stable terrain you’re on. It’s not even _friendly_ terrain. Are you just hoping you’ll all keep your mouths shut, because my boots hit the deck less than an hour before you spilled the beans.” She pauses, remembering something. “You tried to tell Kara once, didn’t you?”

Sam looks away. “Yeah, that... That didn’t go so well.”

“She said she’d _shoot_ you.” Frak, there goes their backup. She trusts Lee to do what he thinks is right, but can’t trust that that includes harboring a cylon fugitive. “Do you have an egress plan, a way to get out, get somewhere safe without anyone getting hurt?”

Sam’s expression is lost. “There’s someplace that’s safe?” he asks.

All the air goes out of her. He has a point.

There’s a noise in the hall, and Sam’s hand tightens on hers as the hatch swings open to reveal their husband. Lee’s face splits into a cautious, weary grin when he spots Dee. “Hey, you. Shouldn’t you be getting debriefed?” He slings his briefcase onto the table with the ease of long practice, shrugging out of his jacket.

“They can find me if they need me,” she says. “Kara’s got all the juicy details.”

“Got any crumbs you can spare me?” Lee asks, dragging a chair over from the desk.

“Are you asking as nosy husband, curious civvie, or impatient Quorum Rep?”

“Who says I can’t be all three?” Lee replies, grinning. Damn, _damn_ , he really needs to be less attractive.

 _“I_ do,” she says firmly. He knows how this works. “Pick one. For the duration.”

“Nosy husband,” he says, leaning forward, concern clear on his face. “I heard there was an explosion…”

“There was, it was an accident, I was banged up a little, but I’m fine. Next question.”

Sam speaks up for the first time. “You should probably see Doc Cottle.”

Dee shrugs. “Pretty sure he’s got enough on his plate, but if I still feel wobbly by the time I need to be back on duty, I’ll check in with him first,” she assures them both.

Lee looks down at his hands and then back up at her. “...you didn’t find Earth, did you?”

“No,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.” There’s a long, quiet moment. “Okay, no more questions until I get some food and maybe a shower. The Demetrius was really, _really_ gross.”

Lee stands, giving her a faltering smile. “Deal. Feel free to complain all you like while you eat.” He glances at Sam and Dee’s hands where they’re still tangled together. “Um. Were you planning to move your things back—?”

“No,” Dee says, glimpsing poorly-hidden relief in his expression. _Guess we’re on the same page about our part of the marriage_ , she thinks, feeling a tinge of unexpected sadness. “Maybe some other time, but not now.”

 

***

 

One of Lee’s aides delivers dinner, which is… odd, but not the strangest thing Dee’s had to deal with in recent memory. Sam seems to pick up on her reluctance to talk about the Demetrius mission in much detail, and steers the conversation towards Lee’s new job. It’s an entirely different kind of bureaucracy than Dee’s used to navigating, but the staggering ridiculosity of civilians is still something they can all relate to, with only token protests from Sam, the most-recently enlisted officer among them.

“Yeah, well, you used to be a _celebrity_ ,” Lee says to him. “That’s not exactly ‘ordinary colonial citizen,’ either.”

Dee’s stomach does a slow flip and she has to reach for her glass to take a drink of water so that she can swallow the food in her mouth. _How many of Sam’s memories are false? How long was he living in the colonies, really?_ She dimly remembers snippets of his pyramid stats from his time in the major leagues, but nothing from the minors, and everything else he’s told her about his life has no corroboration beyond her willingness to trust him.

Sam catches her gaze and his eyes cloud with a like uncertainty. He gives her the faintest, saddest smile she’s ever seen on his face for a fleeting moment, and returns his attention to Lee’s story. His expression is schooled back into attentive amusement, but she can see how tight his fingers are around his silverware.

Lee doesn't seem to notice.

 

***

 

After dinner, Dee tries to report in with the XO, but Tigh’s busy, so she gets redirected to Helo, who tells her that everyone from the Demetrius mission is off-duty until they’ve been debriefed and cleared for duty. They’re also prohibited from leaving the ship, and from accessing the bridge, flight deck, engineering, or any other sensitive locations on Galactica. “Just in case,” he tells her with a wry grin. “Upside, Sharon and I have free time to spend with Hera. I’m sure your family will be glad to see you, too.”

Dee snorts. “Kara’s probably going to be in debriefings for a solid month,” she points out, “Lee’s just as busy if not more so, and is pretty much living on Colonial One now, and Sam…” She doesn’t know where to start with Sam. “Yeah, I can probably track down Sam.”

Helo grins. “See? Time off isn't all bad.” he says, and claps her on the shoulder. “But if you wanna, you know you can always visit, right?”

“Yeah,” she says, nodding. “Thanks. Call me when it’s my turn to go through the wringer.”

“Will do,” he says.

 

***

 

That night and the next morning, Dee walks around the Galactica feeling like there’s a stone in her throat, an anchor at the very back of her tongue. It drags at her thoughts, leaving her uncharacteristically absent-minded. Nobody seems to notice. She wants to scream, just to relieve the pressure.

Though she doesn’t go to their quarters, Sam’s still a presence in her bed as she curls up behind the curtain of her rack. Her thoughts run in circles.

_Sam’s a cylon._

_I’m married to a cylon._

Sleep eludes her for a long time.

Dee looks around when she runs into Sam the next morning, is hyper-conscious of the people around them when they share breakfast in the mess. She keeps expecting to see someone else looking at him like they know, too. Or like they suspect. Her awareness of him is distorted, like the light is all bending in his direction and she’s the only one who can see it.

Nobody seems to notice. Kara’s too caught up in secret meetings to spare Dee more than a brilliant, manic smile when they pass in the hallway and a promise to catch up later. She’s on fire again, blinded with her own purpose. What she’s looking for will bring her right back to them — because in knowing, Dee’s become a part of the secret, too.

_Our husband is one of the Final Five._

As Dee had predicted, Lee’s caught up with Quorum business, the dinner they shared the last she sees of him before all hell breaks loose. Sam disappears right after breakfast, and when Dee asks around at lunch, she gets a string of shrugs before Tyrol tells her that a whole squadron got sent over to the basestar, and Sam was one of them.

He looks at her curiously. “You worried about him?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she says. “He’s my husband.” _And a cylon._ She can almost taste the words on her tongue. “It’s my job to worry.”

Barolay is also gone, and Sharon, and Helo, and Skulls, and Racetrack, and the Admiral’s been in private meetings all day. Dee would give anything for a duty shift in the CIC right now, for the familiar routine, the information at her fingertips, the ability to call out into the void.

Not that she would, not needlessly. But sometimes, knowing she _can_ is as reassuring as actually doing it.

Dee feels unmoored. Her head swims, her stomach churns. The weight in her throat is the only thing keeping her feet on the deck.

Come to think of it, people might have had the right idea about seeing Cottle.

Gaeta is singing in his infirmary bed. She draws close, and he stops when he spies her. “Hey, Dee,” he says.

“Hey,” she says back.

“You just missed your wife and the president,” he says.

“Pfft, I can see _them_ anytime,” she tells him, and pulls up a chair. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back with you.”

His smile is a shadow of its former self. “That’s all right. I knew it was a long shot.”

“What were you singing?”

“Oh, _that_ ,” he pushes himself up against the pillows, and his legs move reflexively to assist. The movement draws her eye to the space below his left knee, but her gaze skitters away again, to the railing on the bed, the curtains, the floor. “Something my grandmother used to sing.”

“I forgot you knew how to sing,” she says. “Remember when the Galactica was getting stripped for decommissioning? You pulled me into the renovated hangar bay just to hear the acoustics.”

His smile gets stronger. “I remember the first time I saw you,” he says. “You stumbled when you got off the raptor, you were looking around so much.”

This is the kind of conversation people have at the end, when one of them is dying. Dee blinks back tears that she didn’t notice were welling up. “What was that really dirty drinking song you tried to teach me?”

“That’s right; you never did hear how it ended. We got distracted when you almost choked on your booze during the chorus.”

“So how _does_ it end?”

“Can’t sing it now, there’s a child present.” he says, gesturing with one hand across the infirmary. Dee looks, and sees Nicky curled up on a hospital bed next to his mom. Cally looks like a wraith, pale and still beneath the blankets, wires and tubes connecting her to an alarming assortment of machines.

“Oh my gods,” Dee says, rising to her feet, half tempted to go over but unwilling to leave Gaeta’s side. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s in a coma,” Gaeta says. “Happened while we were gone. No one’s sure if she did it on purpose, but she took too much of this herbal remedy, or she mixed the wrong medication with it, or something. Tyrol found her unconscious in their quarters and she hasn't woken up since. He lets Nicky visit, says it’s better for him to see his mom than to wonder where she went.” He sighs. “Nicky’s always really good, really quiet. Like a completely different kid. I almost miss the days when he’d scream so hard he’d spit up on me.” He pauses. “Almost.”

Dee spares him a smile for that, and settles back in her chair with one last look across the infirmary. “So what else did I miss?”

“Shit, okay, let me tell you about motherfrakking _Gaius Baltar._ You won’t even _believe…_ ”

 

***

 

She’s still there, listening to ship’s gossip, when they wheel Natalie in, bleeding from gunshot wounds and wheezing like there’s not enough air on the entire ship. The infirmary is thrown into chaos. Gaeta nudges Dee.

“Go find out what happened,” he tells her. “Come back and tell me when you get the news.”

“Will do,” she tells him. _Fair’s fair, after all._

It takes her a while to untangle; there are rumors flying everywhere and while she could easily track the Admiral down, she’s sure as hell not going to bother him now, with the whole ship in an uproar. She goes to the CIC when they call for battle stations, not in full uniform, still not even technically allowed to go, but she does anyway. “Oh thank the gods,” Hoshi says, handing over the comms station like a drowning man grasping at a life raft. “I really missed you,” he says, giving her a sideways hug when they trade places. He drops his voice to a whisper to add, “Tigh’s been _really_ weird.”

“That’s new and different,” she comments dryly, pulling on the headset and easing into the familiar cacophony of sound.

Everything untangles in a matter of minutes.

The basestar has jumped away unexpectedly; it took President Roslin and several military assets with it. Athena is in the brig for shooting Natalie; no one’s sure why.

‘Military assets’ means Sam and Helo and Sharon and a whole bunch of raptors and vipers and other pilots.

No one’s sure when they’ll be back, or if.

 _My husband’s a cylon,_ Dee thinks, and grips the edge of her console until she can feel the bones in her hands creaking.

Tigh comes on deck, cracking orders like a taser, coordinating them all with a jolt. The man’s a mean, vicious drunk, but he knows how to manage soldiers, maybe better than the Admiral does. The Admiral knows people, knows battlefields and tactics and how to balance cost versus reward. The XO knows _war_.

That fact shouldn’t be as reassuring as it is.

 

***

 

Dee gets off shift and heads straight to the nearest rack she can call her own. That it’s also Lee’s and Sam’s doesn’t give her pause. She hasn’t slept since… maybe since the basestar. Maybe since she was knocked out on the Demetrius. She’s not sure.

She finds Kara there, scowling at CAP rotation schedules. It’s almost like old times. “Hey,” she says, detouring to drop a kiss against Kara’s hair and continuing on to the bed without missing a stride.

“Hey,” Kara says absently, and then Dee’s _lying down_ , so if Kara says anything else, she misses it, dropping off to sleep almost immediately.

If she dreams, she doesn’t remember it.

 

 

 

 

— _con't._  —


	4. Revelations

 

When Dee wakes up, she finds out that she’s married to the president.

Correction: when Dee wakes up, bleary-eyed and staring groggily at the chrono in groggy disbelief, she finds out that if she’d been put back on duty, no one’s called her to tell her so, and she’s slept through the first half of her usual shift besides. She resolves to find out as soon as she’s changed and gone to the head.

The smiles she gets in the hallway are new, but she assumes that they’re all from people who hadn’t seen her since she’d left on the Demetrius. She smiles and nods back, her stomach grumbling insistently. She adds ‘go to the mess hall’ to her mental checklist, debating whether it should go before or after finding out if she’s actually working today.

 _Before_ , she decides. In case they put her straight to work again.

She’s changing in her duty locker when Racetrack leans over the side of her bunk. “So, uh. How does the ‘first lady,’ ‘first gentleman’ thing even work when you’re in a plural?”

Dee stares up at her blankly. “I’m sorry?”

“Apollo being president, what do I call you? ’Cause I tell you right now, _nobody’s_ gonna be calling Starbuck any kind of ‘lady’ with a straight face, so you might wanna work that out.”

“That’s not really something we have to worry about yet,” Dee laughs.

“It’s been six hours,” Racetrack says. “I’m surprised the reporters haven’t been on your tail yet.”

“...hang on, wait, I’ve been asleep since last night,” Dee says. “Did I miss something?”

Racetrack chokes on a laugh. “Oh my gods, am I the one who gets to tell you first? This is _amazing_. I am going to be drinking free for _weeks_ with this story.” Dee lifts her eyebrows, impatient, forgetting all about the jacket in her hands. “Okay, okay, so apparently there’s this whole thing about the Quorum getting to pick the president if… whatever. Long story short, they picked Lee, and now you’re married to the acting President of the Twelve Colonies. Until Roslin gets back, of course.”

“...what happened to Zarek?”

Racetrack flaps her hand in the air vaguely. “He’s sketchy, nobody likes him, something like that.”

 _I’m married to the President,_ Dee thinks, and hard on the heels of that fact comes the other, still so new as to be fresh in her mind: _I’m married to one of the Final Five cylons._

_And a woman who came back from the dead._

“...huh,” Dee says out loud. “That’s…” A laugh burbles up from her lungs, past the lead weight in her throat, which seems to shift like a cork, dislodging more giggles. She laughs until her ribs hurt, until she has to lean against the wall and wrap one hand around the stitch growing in her side. “You know,” she tells Racetrack, still snickering, wiping the tears away from her cheeks, “I’ll have to check with my spouses about the finer points of etiquette. But till then, my name or rank will do just fine.”

Racetrack is grinning right back at her. “Can do. Hey, send that asshole my congratulations.”

“Sure thing,” Dee tells her, and finishes putting the rest of her clothes on.

 

***

 

In other news, the Admiral is gone. Dee doesn’t know whether she wants to drag him back home or steal a raptor to camp out with him where he's marooned in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a basestar that might already be destroyed to come back to them. It’s almost romantic.

“It’s _not_ ,” Gaeta tells her when she mentions this. He grits his teeth and swears under his breath, so she chalks his mood up to understandable irritation about the PT he’s doing. She’s trying to talk him through it, with only moderate success. “It’s stupid and suicidal and all that horseshit we’re taught to believe is noble. We’re gonna have Tigh as Admiral and your husband as President and Starbuck as CAG and I am going to make a _mint_ on taking bets about how long _that’ll_ last before we all go to hell in a handbasket.”

“Just a little further,” the nurse tells him.

“Oh, frak my whole life,” Gaeta mutters, but tries anyway. “You know, if it wasn’t for your un-dead wife’s stupid Earth visions, I wouldn’t be stuck here like this.”

Dee knows he’s just venting, but it stings anyway. “ _Felix_ ,” she says reproachfully.

“Yeah, I shouldn’t have said that,” Felix says. “I’m sorry, Dee. It’s just. Look at where we are. The Admiral frakked off on us because he got inappropriately attached to the President, now his son’s got her job, his old drinking buddy has his, and we _still_ don’t know where Earth is. We keep finding ourselves in blind alleys with no way to turn around, and I’m _tired_ , okay.”

Dee doesn’t know what to say to all this. He’s not _wrong_ , precisely, but neither can she bring herself to agree with him.

Cottle comes by to check on him and nods gruff approval at whatever he sees under the bandages. “And you, missy,” he says, turning to Dee next. “I hear you got knocked around pretty good, too. When were you planning to come see me — when your vision got blurry and you stopped being able to stand up without falling over?”

“I’m fine,” Dee assures him.

“Of the two of us, whose actual job is it to determine that?” He doesn’t wait for her to answer. “Uh huh, that’s what I thought, now get up and onto that next bed over there, or I’ll declare you unfit for duty until you come to your senses or faint, whichever comes first. And I don’t care _whose_ wife you are.”

“When you put it _that_ way,” Dee says, then squeezes Gaeta’s shoulder on her way to comply.

 

***

 

They’re back. They’re _back._

Dee runs to the landing bay as fast as her feet can take her, and runs smack into one of the president’s aides on the way. “Sorry,” she says, and the aide blanches when he recognizes her.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says, and over his shoulder, she catches a glimpse of Lee, trailing people in suits like some kind of legislative comet.

“Lee!” she says, and he doesn’t hear her, too busy dodging a reporter’s questions about _what does it mean that the basestar is back_ , and _do you plan to stay president if Roslin is not on board_ , and—

Dee strides right into the crowd, snaring him by the elbow and pulling him into one of the ‘authorized personnel only’ corridors. The marines block the hangers-on from following. It’s a dirty trick, sure, but neither of them have time to waste, and it’s a more direct route to the hangar bay anyway.

“President?” she asks him, giving him an incredulous smile.

“Yeah,” he says. “I, uh, I’m still not quite sure how it happened, but here I am.”

“You lead a charmed life, Lee Adama,” she says, rolling her eyes. “So, um,” she says, feeling the lead weight tug at her tongue, heavier now. “I need to talk to you. And Sam should be there. And Kara. It’s important.”

“Sure,” he says. “You know, after we sort out the current batch of cylon business…”

Gods only know how long _that_ will take. “Sooner than that, maybe,” she says. “Don’t make me make an appointment, Lee. Not for this.”

He seems to finally register her urgency. “Okay, Dee,” he says, looking her square in the eyes, “I hear you. Now, you want to come with me to find out who these Final Five cylons are?”

Dee sighs inwardly. If she’s there with him, she might at least be able to cushion the blow. “Sure, let’s go.”

 

***

 

D’Anna gives her speech, explaining how she plans to hold Roslin and the rest of their human ‘guests’ on the basestar until the Five — _Four?_ — have been allowed to join them. Dee can feel Lee’s anger radiating off him like heat from coals, and the Admiral’s glare is just as fierce. Dee gets to see Sam briefly, shifting impatiently behind D’Anna in the raptor. When she’s done, he moves as if to leave the ship, drop down onto the deck, but D’Anna catches him by the arm and says something through bared teeth that might have been intended as a smile.

He snaps something back angrily, and wrests his arm from her grip, moving past her. Dee catches him up in her arms before he takes three strides. She sees Tory stepping forward to say something to the Admiral and to D’Anna, and wonders...

“What was that?” Lee says.

“Why did she let you go?” Dee asks.

“I told her I’d talk to them,” Sam says tightly, and extricates himself to head off through the crowd.

“What—?” Lee says. “Does he know who they are? Sam!” he raises his voice to shout. _“Sam!”_ He tries to go after him, and Dee resigns herself to something messy and public, but the Admiral saves them all, stepping in front of Lee.

“Mr. President, if I could have a word,” the Admiral says. Dee could kiss him. Lee cranes to see over the heads of the gathered onlookers, but Sam’s already gone. For all the Admiral knows, Lee’s just trying to spot his husband.

“I’ll find him,” she promises Lee, and leaves him behind to deal with his father.

 

***

 

 _A man that tall should not be this difficult to find_ , Dee thinks. _He used to be a celebrity, for gods’ sakes!_

But no, no one’s seen him.

She stops in the middle of one of the main junctions, staring around blankly, trying to think. _If I were a cylon, where would I go…_

“Ma’am,” she hears, and turns to see one of the marines. “If you’re looking for your husband — the pilot, not the suit — he went aft, towards the Colonel’s quarters. He said not to tell anybody if they came looking, but then I saw the XO storming after looking like he was gonna tear someone a new one and… well, if anyone’s the voice of reason around here, I figure it’s you.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Really, you don’t know what this means to me, Parr. I owe you.”

“The fewer fights we gotta break up the better, ma’am,” he says, and she gives him one last grateful smile before she heads down the aft corridor.

She can hear raised voices through the hatch, and pulls it open without knocking.

“What the _hell?_ ” the XO roars. “Nobody invited you, Lieutenant, so I’d suggest—”

She takes a couple of moments to get her bearings as she looks around the room, letting him shout. It feels like the gravity plating was installed wrong here, and she needs to find her balance again. Sam’s here as she expected, acting like a shield between her and the angry XO. Tyrol’s sitting on one of the chairs, palms propped on his knees.

There’s no one else in the room, so they must not have arrived yet. _Unless…_ “Is it Tory?” Dee asks. “Is Tory the fourth?”

Tyrol smiles, humorless and lopsided, shaking his head.

“Did you tell her?” Tigh growls, looking like he’s about to take a swing at Sam.

Sam holds up both hands, empty and open. “...because knocking me out cold in your quarters is such a great way to stay off the radar,” he says, and Tigh’s fist uncurls slightly. “Yeah, I told her. You want me to believe you wouldn’t have told Ellen?” He looks at Tyrol. “Or that you never thought about telling Cally? _Please_.”

“...all right, so who else did you tell?” Tigh snarls. “Because out of all of us, you’re the only one that blabbed, and you’ve got three spouses to my zero and his one… half.”

“Frak you,” Tyrol says, standing. “At least Cally would have kept her mouth shut. _Your_ wife would have—”

“The magical, elusive Final Five, bickering like children,” Dee says, reminding them that she’s still in the room. “I’m the only one he told, and I never said a word to anyone about it. Just like I never said anything about the election, _Sir_. Or how many pregnant girls Cottle _somehow_ managed to sneak on board after the President’s executive order, Chief.” Those secrets seem so small and distant now, gravel rattling under the wheels of a truck with no brakes.

Tyrol shrugs; Tigh still looks mulish. Sam’s the only one with the good grace to look abashed.

“So what’s the plan this time?” Dee asks, folding her arms. “And how can I help?”

There are still a good number of people in the Fleet who owe her favors, after all.

 

***

 

D’Anna acts before they can, flushing one of her hostages and changing the rules. “Enough of this,” Tigh spits, and moves towards the door. “I’m going to the Admiral. I won’t let anyone else die for my secret.”

“ _Our_ secret,” Tyrol reminds him. “We have families, we have more to lose.”

Dee thinks of the Admiral, of Bill Adama, Saul Tigh’s only and best friend in the universe, and sees the buried anguish in the old man’s eyes. “No, you don’t,” she says. “He’ll tell or D’Anna will, or this whole Fleet will get torn apart in a witch hunt, and everyone on that basestar will get flushed out the airlock. What are our other options?”

“We could take a ship,” Tyrol says. “Clear the deck, say it’s for a covert op, everyone will assume it’s for a rescue assault and go along with it. We’ll be gone before they can stop us.”

It feels like New Caprica, but this time, she's collaborating with cylons. No, she's collaborating with the same people; she was collaborating with cylons the whole time. They all were. Now they _know_.

“You going to bring Cally and Nicky, get people to think that’s part of the op?” Sam says. “Or are you going to leave them behind?”

“They’re safer if I go, either way. Among the four of us, we could pull it off.”

Dee does the math. “He’s right,” she says. “But it means one of us would have to be in the CIC. Guess that’s me.”

“Well, hell, if the Colonel is so willing to play martyr…” Sam says, turning to look at Tigh and stopping short.

They all look at the empty space where Tigh had been standing, then at each other. In retrospect, they probably should have kept a better eye on him.

“I’m getting reinforcements,” Dee says, and heads for the hatch.

“Who?” Sam asks.

“Only person I know can trump the XO’s crazy with her own,” Dee says. And maybe the acting president, too, if she can find him.

 

***

 

She finds Lee first, but it’s still too late; he’s in the Admiral’s quarters with his father, and the Colonel has clearly been and gone, leaving destruction in his wake. She doesn’t see the Admiral. Lee doesn’t let her in that far, but she can hear quiet sobbing coming from somewhere behind him. Her stomach curdles at the sound.

From the look on Lee’s face, she won’t get any help from anyone named ‘Adama’ today. “Never mind,” she tells him. “Stay here, take care of the old man.”

“What are you doing?” he asks. “Dee!”

She’s about to answer when Cottle comes up behind her, pushing both of them out of his way. “Don’t you have someplace better to be, Mister President?” he asks Lee pointedly.

“I—” Lee frowns. It’s oddly satisfying to see him at a loss for words.

“You called me for a reason, kid. I’ll give him something to help calm him down,” Cottle says in a low voice. “That’s my job. Now go do yours.”

Lee closes his mouth, sets his jaw, and nods. By the time he turns to Dee, his shoulders are straight and his eyes are glittering hard and fierce. “Come with me,” he tells her.

“I need to—” she starts.

“That’s an _order_ , Lieutenant,” he says, heading off into the corridor, his pair of marine guards falling into step behind him. Too stunned to reply, she follows, not so much out of compliance as wanting to be near him when she finds her voice again.

Admittedly, she also wants to know what he’s planning to do. She’s never seen him like this; people in the hallway spot him coming and clear out of the way, astonished expressions and whispers following in their wake.

It’s not until she sees the row of marines standing armed and ready at the end of a launch tube that apprehension kicks in, hard. She trails to a stop in the middle of the otherwise-empty hangar bay. “Lee...” she says.

He turns to look at her, and she takes a step back when his gaze reaches hers. Her husband is almost unrecognizable, cold and remote, beyond righteous fury and into the stony emotionless detachment that she’s only ever seen Roslin inhabit in extremity. “The President of the Colonies can only carry out the execution of a senior commissioned officer with another ranking officer present,” he reminds her, as if regs will make the whole situation make _sense_.

Suddenly, she understands. “ _What_.”

“Do I need to call Agathon?” Lee asks her. He doesn’t threaten to throw her in the brig for not immediately going along with him, as he would be entitled to do, but that’s the most forgiving he’s likely to be right now.

“...no,” Dee says, swallowing against the stone in her throat. “No,” she repeats, “I’ll do it.” The last thing in the universe she wants to do is watch him turn that launch key, but she doesn’t want to be sent away, doesn’t want to pass the responsibility to Helo.

 _What would he do, if he were here in my place?_ she wonders. No, knowing Helo, he’d protest strenuously and get thrown into the brig himself, if not the infirmary. _Gods, this is a mess._

“Then take your post, Lieutenant,” Lee says, opening the hatch to the control room. She enters, but he doesn’t follow. “I’ll be in in a moment,” he tells her.

“What—” Dee says, but he’s already gone around the corner, heading towards the launch tube. She could follow him, but the marines would probably bar her way.

Left alone in the small, narrow room, Dee looks out through the window and sees Colonel Tigh standing at attention between the magrails, chin lifted high under the glare of the lights overhead. She watches Lee approach the XO, adding the momentum of his last swift steps to the punch he throws at Tigh’s face.

It connects hard enough to make Tigh stagger back.

Lee says something, but the intercom is off, so Dee can’t hear it. The phone rings, and she takes a deep breath before answering. She listens for a moment, then turns on the intercom.

“Mr. President,” she says. “It’s the CIC. D’Anna’s on the line.” Lee joins her, and she hands him the phone.

She can only hear his side of the conversation. “This is the president,” he says, then pauses. “No, you are. It’s your turn to listen. You harm another one of my people, you blacken so much as one of their eyes… and I flush Saul Tigh out the launch tube.” Pause. “No, you deal with me. You have ten minutes to release my people, or you can kiss one of your precious Final Five goodbye.”

 _We can’t do this,_ Dee thinks. _Sam’s a cylon, too, same as the Colonel._

No, she can’t betray Sam, not now, not like this. Not when _Lee’s_ like this. If there’s a chance Sam can escape the fate Tigh is facing down, she’ll give him what time she can to do so.

 _I’ll have to be enough,_ Dee thinks. _I have to try._

Lee hangs up and leans forward, toggling the intercom back on. “You wanna save the Fleet?” he asks Tigh. “I need the others, and I need them now.”

Dee stares through the thick glass, willing Tigh not to do it.

 

***

 

Lee takes a step back, recoiling from the window, and Dee exhales heavily. “You son of a bitch,” she spits at Tigh, and then switches off the intercom before she can hear what he says in return. “Lee—” she starts, reaching out towards her husband.

His palm is over his mouth, eyes desolate and unfocused as he stares straight ahead. “How long have you known?” he asks in a low voice, dropping his hand.

Her own hand stops, hanging in midair for a moment before she pulls it back. “What?” she asks. _What does that even matter now?_

“How _long_ , Dee?” he shouts.

She sighs. “Not long. Sam told me when I got back from the Demetrius.”

“And you didn’t think to tell _me?_ ” he asks.

“No!” she snaps, voice raising. One of their informal wedding oaths: _don’t tell each others’ secrets._ “I thought he should tell you himself! But it’s not like I’ve had many chances anyway, is it, Mr. _President?_ ”

Lee doesn’t answer her. “The whole time you were gone… he knew. He _knew_. And he didn’t say one word.”

“He probably tried,” she says. “He tried with Kara. She said she’d _shoot_ him.” The stone in her throat has partially dissolved, but the remnants taste like bile, like ash. “What are you going to do?”

Lee scrubs his hands over his face. “Detain them, at least,” he says bleakly. “I can’t do _nothing_.”

Dee can’t breathe. _“Lee_ ,” she says.

“What am I supposed to do, Dee? He lied to me – to us! He let us think—” Lee takes a deep, ragged breath, and schools his face into a rigid mask once more, turning away from Dee. “Medina, Parr!” The two marines appear at the door.

“Sir?” Parr asks.

“Please get a team to find Chief Petty Officer Tyrol and Junior Lieutenant Anders. Bring them both here immediately,” Lee tells them.

“Yes, sir,” Medina replies promptly. Parr’s eyes flick to Dee’s face, and she gives him a despairing look, unable to countermand the order directly.

“...yes, sir,” Parr echoes, and they go.

“What will you do when they get here?” Dee asks in the silence.

“We’ll see what happens when they get here,” Lee answers.

 

***

 

Dee hears them coming and leaves the control room to meet them, duty be damned.

Tyrol and Sam are flanked by marines on all sides, and their arms are bound behind them even though they’re coming along peacefully enough. Sam’s head is hanging and Tyrol’s smirking.

 _“Sam_ ,” she calls, and his head lifts, eyes lighting up.

“Did Kara find it?” he asks.

“Find what?” Dee asks, but Lee draws up next to her, and Sam’s gaze shifts to Lee, finding whatever answer he was looking for. His shoulders slump.

“Lee,” he says. “You need to wait, we’re so close, please, _wait_ , Kara will find it.”

“Your husband has us marched to an airlock in restraints and you still think he’s going to listen?” Tyrol says, shaking his head, sounding amused. “Man, give it up.”

“We’re not in the airlock yet,” Sam shoots back.

“Colonel Tigh is,” Lee informs them, “and you have thirty seconds to tell me why I should wait for Starbuck before I send you in there with him.”

“It’s her ship,” Sam says. “Something changed, something… activated, I don’t know. She’s checking it out now, all she needs is time.”

“We don’t have time,” Lee says. “Not for something that vague. There are lives on the line.”

“Ask the Colonel if you don’t believe us,” Tyrol offers, shrugging. “He had to feel it, even if we were separated. Maybe Tory, too. About… fifteen minutes ago or so.”

“How do I know this isn’t something you cooked up as a contingency measure, to stall us in case we found you?” Lee looks skeptical, but he’s listening. Dee’s not sure she believes them, either, but she’ll grasp at whatever straw she has to, right now.

“Call the basestar,” she suggests. “Have them ask Tory. If you still don’t believe it, you’ll at least have them on the line to negotiate.”

Lee thinks about it. “Fine,” he says finally. “It might buy us time, either way.” He turns his back on them, going to the control room.

Dee lingers, giving Sam a shaky smile. “I didn’t tell him.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sam replies, his own smile weak reassurance.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” she promises.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Kara will figure it out, we’ll be fine.” Beside him, Tyrol snorts. “Man, shut _up_ ,” Sam tells him.

“I should…” she says, gesturing. _Make sure Lee doesn’t do anything stupid and upstanding_ , she finishes silently.

“Yeah,” Sam says, and Dee turns away. As she goes, she nods to Parr and Medina, trying to read where they stand. Medina’s frowning thoughtfully, and Parr looks conflicted.

By the time she reaches Lee, the conversation is going about as well as can be expected. “–all we’re asking for is _time_ ,” Lee says into the phone, between his teeth. “I still have Saul Tigh on the express ride to a vacuum, and Tyrol and Anders are in line right behind him.” A pause. “You think I won’t? Try me.” He hangs up and leans forward, jaw clenched tight.

“Dee,” he says. “If… if the time comes, don’t watch.”

“You _wouldn’t,_ ” she says, staring at him in disbelief.

“I might not have a choice, Dee,” he says. Dee can’t move. She’s frozen and brittle and hollow, and all it will take to shatter her is one wrong move.

_All of us, family, and none of us belong here._

The phone rings. “Are you going to get that, Lieutenant?” he asks.

A flood of white-hot rage washes through Dee, thawing her enough to react. “You know what? No, I’m not,” she replies. “I don’t give a frak what your title is now; I don’t give a frak whose son you are. That’s _our_ husband out there, and I’m not going to take _any_ orders that mean I’m going to have to watch you flush him out an airlock.” She takes the launch key from its lock and slaps it onto the console between them. “You were an officer. You know how everything works. Answer your own damn phone.”

Tigh’s watching from the launch tube, but she couldn’t care less. Lee looks at her, then down at the key. Dee wonders what she’ll do if he reaches for it.

And then she hears Kara shouting frantically, distant but getting closer. “ _Wait!_ ” Starbuck runs in and shoves her way between Dee and Lee, snatching the key out of reach. “Those three frakking cylons just gave us Earth,” Kara tells them breathlessly.

Dee could kiss her. To hell with it, Dee _does_ kiss her, dragging her close with one hand on her neck for an exultant, grateful, desperately relieved moment.

Starbuck pulls back, grinning. “I know, right?” she says. “Frakking _hell_ , that was way too close.”

Dee couldn’t agree more.

 

***

 

Lee has the three “Final Five” cylons sent to the brig, and Kara leads him towards her viper, explaining what she’s found in a rush.

Dee barely hears a fraction of it, head swimming. No one notices when she peels off from the entourage and ducks into the nearest head, legs wobbly and stomach churning. She vomits until she feels wrung out, tears streaming down her face.

It takes a while before she recovers enough to stand up again. Her first few steps are uneven, but she makes it to the sink, turns on the tap with shaking hands, and avoids looking in the mirror while she washes her face and smooths back her hair as best as she can. She switches the temperature to lukewarm and takes a careful drink, knowing cold water or too much of it will only make her empty gut cramp up again.

 _What am I supposed to do now?_ she asks herself. Her reflection has no answer, so she turns away. She _wants_ to get drunk, but that’s a worse idea than a gallon of icewater.

Exiting the hatch, Dee walks into a cacophony of sound, reporters clamoring for answers.

“Who are the Final Five?” one asks.

“Is it true that one of them is one of your spouses?”

“Is it President Adama?”

“Did they tell you the way to Earth?”

“Did the cylons execute any more of their hostages?”

“Was one of the dead hostages President Roslin?”

Dee steps back. The only reason the press hasn’t swarmed the bathroom is because there are marines posted at the hatch. Dee closes it again.

 _I’m married to the President of the Colonies_ , Dee thinks. _I’m married to a Cylon._

_I’m married to a woman who came back from the dead._

Her stomach turns over again, jaw going tight. She breathes very carefully for half a minute.

“Guess I’m going the long way around,” she mutters to herself, and heads towards the other exit.

 

***

 

The infirmary is quiet when she arrives, and Gaeta’s asleep. Someone has the radio on, and Dee drifts over to sit by Cally’s bed. “You might have the right idea,” Dee says to her, “sleeping through all this. Galen’s going to have a lot of explaining to do when you wake up, though.” She wonders if Cally did it on purpose, had tried to kill herself for some reason. They won’t know if – _until_ – she wakes up.

Dee kind of thinks she might have. Not because she thinks Cally had good reason to, but because she understands, a little, how overwhelmed she must have felt. _Everyone has a breaking point_ , Dee thinks.

She’s pretty sure that if she’d seen Sam in the launch tube, Lee’s hand on the key, that would have been hers.

"–believe that we have discovered the location of Earth, the home of the Thirteenth Tribe,” Roslin is saying on the radio. “It’s a little over three jumps away for the Fleet, so we expect to arrive sometime in the next thirty-six hours.”

“Huh,” Dee says to Cally. “Look at that. Maybe there’s some hope after all.”

 

***

 

_**Earth.** _

Kara had brought back photos of a living green world; she’d told Dee stories of blue skies and open air and sunshine during the long dark nights of Demetrius. Kara had painted visions that Dee had seen turn real, had made promises, had lost good soldiers’ lives in her quest to bring them all here. Kara made them all risk _everything_.

Dee could spit in her face.

But Kara looks genuinely bewildered and devastated, like she’s been betrayed by the gods as much as any of the rest of them. Why would she be brought back to life, after all, only to have her lead them all to this long-dead beach? There’s a crowd milling about, individually and in twos and threes, all with equally-desolate expressions, shock and betrayal and disbelief and grief mixed in.

It’s worse than New Caprica, because that had been their own failure, their own bad luck, their own mistakes. This is the universe just… being _cruel_.

“I don’t understand,” Lee mutters, a few paces ahead. Dee lets him walk on. She can catch up later. Right now, her legs feel too heavy to move. She spots a glint in the sand and drops to her knees, brushing the sandy dirt away.

It’s a watch, face shattered and hands hanging lax and crooked. Not too far away, she sees a child’s toy. Dee doesn’t remember what it’s called; it’s an ancient game she recognizes from a museum exhibit in Tawa. She digs up several of the small caltrops-shaped pieces. She keeps digging until she can’t find any more, until the hole fills up with water, tears streaking down her face and falling into the tiny pool.

She feels stupid and helpless, weeping here for whatever child had died with these in their hand, but she can’t move. Even when she feels the chilly moisture from the ground seep through the shins and knees of her trousers, even when the frigid air creeps down the neck of her jacket and her fingertips go numb, she remains there, staring out at the jagged horizon, metal biting into her palm.

“Hey,” a familiar voice says. She startles slightly, looking up at Sam’s silhouette against the cloudy sky. He crouches down beside her, face peaceful and calm. She wants to shake him, tell him to take a good look around. He has no _right_ to look that serene. “I remembered some stuff. I… we came from here, the five of us, we left when all this happened. This used to be _home_.”

Dee stares at him. “What?” she asks. “How?” This planet has been dead since long before the first cylons had been built.

“I don’t know, either,” he says, “but I know it’s true.” He puts down the long plank of wood he’d been carrying, and Dee sees that it’s the neck of some musical instrument. “Same way I know I used to sing.”

Dee blurts out a sound that might be a laugh, even though it sounds more like a sob. “Celebrity here, too, huh?”

He smiles gently. “Well, I don’t remember being _successful_.” He wraps an arm around her shoulders, and Dee sees a Six watching them. Which Six, she can’t tell for sure, but she thinks she recognizes the clothes she's wearing.

There’s movement behind Dee, and she twists to spot Lee. He opens his mouth, then closes it again. His red-rimmed eyes are more eloquent than any words, and Sam stands, helping Dee to her feet.

And then Sam holds out a hand to their husband. Lee looks down at it, then back up again. _“Sam_ ,” he starts.

“C’mere,” Sam says roughly, and his outstretched arm shifts from a handshake to a hug that Lee steps into, tucking his face into Sam’s shoulder. Lee takes several shuddering breaths.

Dee watches from a few steps away, strangely unmoved. It’s not that she’s still mad at Lee, but neither does she feel relief or gladness at seeing them make some gesture at reconciliation. She just feels… numb.

She lets Lee take her hand, though, manages to muster a smile for them both, lets Sam slide his other arm around her waist. “We’re missing someone,” she points out.

“Kara wandered off that way, I think,” Lee says, pointing off towards the scrubby inland flats. “Want to go find her?”

“I’ll do it,” Sam says, pressing a kiss against Dee’s hairline. “I think it’s my turn, anyway.”

“Okay,” Dee says, as he goes, her gaze drifting off to the distant gray horizon again. She sees the same Six as before, standing with Gaius in front of D’Anna, who’s looking up at them with a puzzled frown. She sees Tigh at the shoreline, squinting out at the water. She sees the President huddled on the ground much as Dee had been not too long ago, the Admiral at her side.

“Did you find something?” Lee asks, and Dee looks down at her hand, still clasped tightly around the game pieces. She opens her fingers, showing him, and he picks one out, holding it up. “They look like little stars,” he says.

“Yeah,” she agrees, letting the rest fall back into the dirt. Her palm stings where they pierced the skin. “They do.”

 

***

 

Dee doesn’t remember the raptor ride back. She only dimly recalls the crowd on the hangar deck, but dodging unnoticed through busy spaces is second nature by now. The head isn’t empty, but there’s a shower stall free, and she strips down on autopilot, standing under the hot spray, still shivering.

The cold of the planet is still embedded in her joints and in the core of her chest. She can still taste ash and bile. There’s still grit under her fingernails.

“Hey, Dee,” someone says behind her, and she doesn’t move. “Dee, c’mon, you’ve been in there a while, save some hot water for the rest of us.” Stiffly, Dee turns around. Athena’s holding out a threadbare robe, and Dee steps into it, letting Athena drape it around her shoulders.

Athena rubs soothing circles into her back. “It’s going to be okay,” she says, and Dee can’t even muster up anger at the lie. “C’mon, let’s get you dressed. I’ve got someone who’s been asking to see you for _days_.”

Dee blinks at her, and Athena smiles.

“You haven’t visited Hera in a while,” Athena replies to her unspoken question. “And she won’t let me hear the end of it, believe me. C’mon.”

 

***

 

Helo is swooping Hera through the air, and Dee feels her face break open in a smile, feels herself laughing at the infectious merriment in the air. It feels normal here, in the Agathon quarters, feels untouched by everything else outside. Hera beams at her, wrapping her arms tightly around Dee’s middle.

“You have no idea what’s happened, do you?” Dee murmurs to Hera, cuddling her tight. “Today’s just another day.”

Hera’s the perfect distraction: just complicated enough that Dee’s thoughts don’t wander far, but not difficult either, not taxing reserves Dee doesn’t have to spare. Playing with her and feeding her and reading to her and tucking her in bed is as familiar a routine as working in the CIC, but simpler in some ways. The stakes aren’t as cataclysmic.

(Hera might disagree, given her tantrum when Zo the mouse, her favorite stuffed toy, disappeared right before naptime, but that was easily resolved. There are only so many places it could hide in a space that small.)

She turns the radio on low while Hera sleeps, dials through the small handful of stations, avoids the pundits and their endless, useless opinions about their situation. The empty static carries more signal.

On one station, Lee is saying, "–now have a choice: we can either view this as a catastrophe or an opportunity. I, Lee Adama, choose the latter. We’re no longer enslaved by the ramblings of Pythia, no longer pecking at the breadcrumbs of the Thirteenth Tribe... We are now _free_ , to go where we want to go and be who we want to be.”

Dee lets herself smile, a little. He always was good with words. Effortless, deft, invincible.

 

***

 

Helo and Sharon come back from their last flight of the day, leaving Dee free to leave. “You don’t have to go,” Sharon says, worry heavy in her voice and in her eyes.

“It’s okay,” Dee says. “I should probably look for my own family, see how they’re doing.”

That’s not why she’s going, but it’s as good an objective as any. She makes her way to their old shared quarters, not knowing what to expect. She’s too tired to expect anything, at this point. She might just curl up on the bed and sleep.

It feels like she could sleep for _years_.

She finds Lee there, standing in the darkened room, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. He’s lost in thought, fingers absently tracing the statues of Artemis and Aphrodite that still sit on one shelf, next to the four books they got from the Admiral and the now-retired Top Gun stein Kara got back after Kat died.

A pocket watch sits on top of the stack of books. It reminds Dee of the one she found on the shoreline a few hours ago. She should have kept it, brought it back with her. Maybe it could have been fixed.

“Hi, Lee,” she says.

His face lights up. “Hi, Dee.”

“I heard your speech on the radio,” she tells him.

“Good,” he says, nodding. “I’m glad.”

“It was very… you,” she says, and he laughs. “I mean that as a compliment, really.”

“If you say so,” he replies. “...so, uh,” he says, ducking his head. “I know this isn’t exactly what we were hoping for, but. Remember, before you left on the Demetrius? We said that maybe, once Kara found the way to Earth, we could try to find a fresh start.”

“Yeah,” Dee says. “I remember that.” It feels like so long ago.

“I was thinking about that, when I was trying to figure out what I was going to say to the Quorum.” He taps a fingertip against the top of Athena’s helmet. “And I remembered… You know, my dad told me that it was you who convinced him to come down to Kobol, to reunite the Fleet. He said…” Lee clears his throat before continuing, “he said you told him that, ‘ _it was time to heal the wounds_.’ I think — I want us to do that. I want to make amends, to find a way to move forward. To heal.”

“You and me?” she asks.

“All of us,” he says. “We’ve all drifted apart. But yeah, you and me.”

Dee thinks about this. It seems like too little, too late, but it’s also such a simple thing he’s asking, really. She can give him that much.

“Okay,” she says, and his eyebrows lift, like he wasn’t expecting that answer. “Why don’t you… take me to dinner. We’ll see what happens.”

“Yeah, sure,” he says. “...did you want to go now?”

Dee laughs, a light huff of breath. “Give me half an hour,” she says. “I want to change.”

 

***

 

They get dinner. It’s nice; it’s good. It reminds her of their early courtship, when he’d been determined to do the very best with the bad hand they’d all been dealt. When his idealism hadn’t curdled to pig-headed disappointment. When he was still _Apollo_.

Dee lets herself enjoy it, while it lasts. She doesn’t think about tomorrow. She doesn’t even think about their cylon husband or their mad prophet wife or Pegasus or New Caprica or anything that happened between them other than this: how he makes her smile, how she can tease a blush out of him, how her heart flutters when his fingers brush against hers.

It ends, though, just like she knew it would. She lets him walk her to her duty locker, knowing better than to go back to their quarters. That’s too much, right now.

He seems to understand.

She kisses him, remembering what it was like to fall in love with him the first time, and then lets him go.

“Look at you,” Felix says from his bunk when she enters the room. She does a little shimmy, letting the fringe on her dress spin out a little. “You’re _glowing_.” He shakes his head. “All I can think about is that waste of a planet down there.”

“Felix, _please_ ,” she says, trying to hold onto her good mood. She opens her locker, looks in the mirror to see how much of her makeup survived the meal.

“Did you tell him?” Felix asks.

“No, it didn’t feel like the right time,” Dee replies, letting her eyes drift upwards to the small black-and-white printout tucked behind her mirror that Cottle gave her, days ago. “Besides, I don’t even know if he’s the father.” She takes off her necklace, hanging it on the hook. “I should talk to them all at once. That would the best way.”

“Fair enough,” Felix says, standing with some effort. “Bit of advice? Tell them soon. We all need good news, right now. And I think Kara will need all the time she can get to deal with the fact that you’re going to be parents.”

Dee laughs and closes her locker, turning towards him. “You might be right. Getting them all in the same room at once is harder than it sounds, though. Unless there’s a crisis.”

“Ha, right. Good luck.” Gaeta gives her a strained smile. “See you tomorrow, Dee.”

“Yeah,” she says firmly. “See you tomorrow.”

 

***

 

Dee dreams of being lost on an empty basestar. She wanders echoing corridors until she finds the room with the Hybrid.

It speaks: “...thus will spring forth the daughter of the mouth of the river and the fourth of the fifth, composing strings of fourths, repeating, repeating, repeating…” Dee kneels down next to its tank, listening to the hypnotic rhythm of its voice. “Reactivation request: granted. Access: granted. Parallel incarnations, parallel processing, processing, processing. Parallel branches winding from the same root, twinned systems running on mirrored partitions. Discrepancies will inevitably arise given sufficient iterations...” The Hybrid doesn’t seem to be aware of her. It stares up at the ceiling or the stars beyond the bulkhead and runs the ship and continues to talk _._ “Legacy code detected. Compiling. Backups coming online. A star reaches apotheosis before it falls and falls and falls to earth beneath a rising moon to raise the new sun’s daughter, the sister of the daughter of titans; entangled godheads recreating themselves once more after the end after the end after the end.”

Its head turns, eyes suddenly focused on Dee.

“She brings a fair wind and a fresh start. End of line.”

 

 

 

— end of _Precession_. Series TBC —


End file.
